“Art review: Steve Hurd 'Five Fictions' at Rosamund Felsen Gallery - Los Angeles Times” plus 1 more

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Art review: Steve Hurd 'Five Fictions' at Rosamund Felsen Gallery - Los Angeles Times Posted: 21 Oct 2010 07:29 PM PDT October 21, 2010 |  7:00 pm Steve Hurd takes a shotgun approach to painting in "Five Fictions," an exhibition with nearly as many ways of making a painting (five) as works displayed (eight). At Rosamund Felsen Gallery, the tactic pays off in spades, evoking both the try-everything desperation of a culture in freefall and the all-at-once/all-the-time mania of the present. The first group consists of the two largest pieces, "End of the Road" and "Tower of Babel." Each occupies a custom-made canvas whose shape exactly matches the image depicted: the front end of a life-size semi tractor, which appears to be barreling right at you, and a stack of pre-digital audio-visual equipment, its reel-to-reel decks and mixing boards forming a teetering tower that messes with your body's equilibrium. The second group is made up of three rectangular canvases that initially appear to be juicy abstractions, their surfaces dense tangles of serpentine lines in various combinations of lusciously mixed colors. Then you notice the tiny fairies, each holding a paintbrush and seemingly hard at work. In Hurd's art, the impossible happens. And it's never what you expect. Each of his three remaining paintings follows an approach all its own. One is a still life of an inflatable globe going flat. Another is all text, a business proposition by an artist who sounds clueless but may be more clever than most. And the third is a drippy picture of a yellow street sign, its warning printed in reverse. That's how you'd see it in your rearview mirror, too late to heed but with plenty of time for the dread to begin building in the pit of your stomach. -- David Pagel Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 828-8488, through Nov. 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.rosamundfelsen.com Photo: Steve Hurd's "End of the Road." Credit: Rosamund Felsen Gallery   This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php Five Filters featured article: Beyond Hiroshima - The Non-Reporting of Falluja's Cancer Catastrophe.

Pulp Fictions: A Tour Through Artist Daniel Gordon's Studio - ARTINFO Posted: 22 Oct 2010 01:59 PM PDT Photo by Katie Osgood Artist Daniel Gordon NEW YORK— A studio visit with photographer Daniel Gordon seemed seasonally apt when I swung by the photographer's Brooklyn space: the floor was thickly carpeted with bright, crinkly leaves (of paper), among which slabs of meat covered in flies and severed hairy limbs stretching out from the pulpy waves (also all made of paper) could be identified, resembling a goofy — and recyclable — Halloween display. Buried among the sculptural forms and computer printouts were the operating-table-ready scalpels that Gordon favors for his 3-D collage practice, for which he builds sculptures from Google-sourced images that he then photographs. While this added another touch of the macabre to the workspace, during my stay, at least, no blood was shed. Meanwhile, it was hard to avoid the anxiety that comes with trampling over plants, vegetables, faces, and other body parts, when all around the studio hang test prints and photographs depicting these same sculptural forms. In the middle of the visit, I find that in avoiding stepping on a paper potato, I throw my whole body weight onto a paper rubber plant lying on the floor — the photograph of which I'm admiring as I crush its subject. (That photo is  featured in the artist's upcoming book, tentatively titled "Bodies and Parts," due out from Damiani in fall 2011.) Gordon, however, is quick to reassure me that he likes it when his works get mashed underfoot, letting them constantly evolve into new forms. "The process has really become improvised just by the nature of my studio, and what I stumble upon," he says. Gordon is quick to draw a parallel between his studio space and the Internet, both of which are "this big jumbled mess," he says. "Online it seems seamless, but here it's just a mess. It really is a mess online too, but we just can't see it." The artist, who is reading the 1881-1906 volume of John Richardson's massive Picasso biography (though he prefers Matisse biographer Hilary Spurling's writing style), led me safely through the thicket of his studio, talking about how to make cobwebs by letting hot glue dry, how delicious "Sunday sauce" from Frankie's is, and why there are so many potatoes scattered around the room. "I've made a lot of potatoes this summer, but they never even wound up in a picture," Gordon said on that last subject. "I made like 20 potatoes and now they're just there. But maybe six months down the line, when they're all mushed up, maybe something will happen." For more excerpts from this conversation, and images of the studio, click the slide show at left. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php Five Filters featured article: Beyond Hiroshima - The Non-Reporting of Falluja's Cancer Catastrophe.

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