Alfond Collection: Artists S-V

Hybridity, appropriation, transformation, and narration underpin Matt Saunders’s practice. Engaging the histories and techniques of film, photography, and painting, Saunders creates large-format two-dimensional works, as well as animations, films, and installations that intentionally merge mechanical and hand-produced images and processes in a material-driven conceptualism.

In Borneo (Rose Hobart) #5, Version 2, Saunders portrays Depression-era actress Rose Hobart in a still from East of Borneo (1931). The B movie gained cult status from Joseph Cornell’s surrealist 1936 edit. Saunders co-opts this frame in a characteristic gesture that pulls obscure cinematic history into the realm of portrait painting. He uses the complex technique of creating a hand-painted, colorized negative from a black-and-white film still, which he then develops on photosensitive paper. The resulting image is necessarily inverted and a photographic print of what is essentially a painting—capturing every minute gesture of Saunders’s brush.

Here, Hobart is parting a curtain, as if she just appeared on the scene. While providing compositional drama, the curtain emphasizes Saunders’s painterly technique in diaphanous veils of inky blues, purples, and umbers. Color has only recently become an active component of the artist’s work and its presence, as in Cornell’s appropriation of East of Borneo or the first color movies such as Gone With the Wind (1929), has a somewhat surreal effect, as if the color were not necessarily descriptive of a thing or place but of an idea. In selecting this fragment of found imagery for his ode to Hobart, Saunders is front-loading a theatrical moment, and this triggers viewers’ own vaults of memories so that they may project their own versions of what has just passed or is about to happen.

As at the end of a film when credits give way to the momentary flickering of the end-pieces of a filmstrip, Saunders exposes the edges of his painterly negatives. We see bent corners of fabric and the irregular edges of the material as it is captured on the paper. The effect of this gesture, at once painterly and conceptual, reminds viewers that they occupy a constructed space and points to the ephemerality of the artist’s reconstructed scenes and the subjects he chooses to reanimate.  

In 2013, Saunders reflected on how his photographs have become “more animated and liquid… in a medium between media.” His photographs are fleeting ciphers, fugitive expressions of imagined spaces and the in-between; and in a world of so much digital creation and manipulation, Saunders’s process is anti-mechanical, driven by the connection between the eye, the hand, and the beating heart.

--Abigail Ross Goodman

At first glance, Thomas Scheibitz’s paintings appear to be happy concoctions of comic abstraction with inflections of the neo-classical surrealist paintings of Giorgio de Chirico and hints of El Greco’s painterly drama. A synthesized blend of abstraction and realism that generates geometrically determined space and gestures towards platonic forms, Scheibitz’s paintings are deeply conceptual propositions that address notions of linguistic structure as it pertains to an increasingly imaged-based society. The artist uses a self-described bifurcated “studio system” split between his sculpture and painting. While differing in process, both sides use an aggregate of shapes in a range of colors and combinations from a growing lexicon of abstract forms of the artist’s making. This vocabulary is indirectly generated by Scheibitz’s ongoing image archive—itself an amalgamation sourced from popular media and imagery with a particular interest in graphics. Isolated and modified letters routinely appear alongside basic forms to argue that it is not in the single term or element but in the combination of elements—be they letters, symbols, words, or ideas—where meaning lies. In all, Scheibitz presents the structure of painting—in line, color, form, etc.—as an endless resource by which to process the world around us, and vice versa.

In A Panoramic VIEW of Basic Events (2011), Scheibitz uses a nine-panel grid and title to evoke a dramatic narrative arc in an abstract storyboard. The geometry moves between utter flatness, shallow shading, and three-dimensional rendering in a way that adheres to the push-pull of modernist abstraction, yet with the undertone of comic sensibilities in speech bubbles and frames. Like a filmic storyboard, Scheibitz’s Panoramic VIEW moves in and out of space in a further play of contrasts between detailed close-ups and pulled-back “shots.” In doing so, the painting blurs any sense between details, fragments, and full compositions. 

--Dina Deitsch

The artist’s Georgette und Landschaft merges portrait and landscape genres in a compressed and fragmented space as Scheibitz continues both to dismantle and to build up the case for painting today. Here each mark and gesture is a deliberate play off another—a lyrical line, a brushy expanse, and architectonic form—to create a scene of mystery and drama. In both paintings, Scheibitz uses a spare but jarring palette and reductive forms to present limitless possibilities for abstraction.

--Dina Deitsch

Repetition. Process. Time. These are the three qualities that Iranian-American artist Hadieh Shafie identifies as constants in her work, and they are all visible in her meticulously crafted painting White, Turquoise, Green, Gold, Yellow, and Blue (2012). Shafie’s painstaking process begins with hand-coloring strips of paper and inscribing the length of each with a single word written again and again like a mantra: esheghe, the Farsi word for love. She then rolls the paper into hundreds of tiny individual scrolls, which are subsequently arranged to form a larger composition.

Just as Shafie’s prismatic paintings are composed of thousands of layers of tightly wound paper, they also carry multiple levels of meaning. On one level, her work brings together several strands of Persian culture. Her accumulations of circular discs resemble Middle Eastern tilework, an effect that is enhanced by her chosen palette in White, Turquoise, Green, Gold, Yellow, and Blue. She acknowledges her heritage even more directly in her use of Farsi script. Since Islamic calligraphy is writing in the service of God, Shafie’s spirituality is a vital part of her creative process as well as her finished product. By winding the paper, however, she nearly obscures the text, and once the piece is completed it can only be glimpsed upon close examination. This gesture raises larger questions of accessibility and translation across cultures, yet given the text the artist has chosen, speaks to the undeniable universality of love.

On another level, Shafie’s compositions resonate with multiple moments in the history of abstraction as it developed in Europe and America. The gestural nature of calligraphy is analogous to the Abstract Expressionists’ mark-making, which Shafie cites as a specific source of inspiration. Her vibrant palette also bears a resemblance to the saturated hues favored by the Washington Color School. These psychedelic shades and their geometric patterning find yet another parallel in the visual effects of 1960s Op Art. The different colors identified in the title of White, Turquoise, Green, Gold, Yellow, and Blue recede and advance based on their temperature, generating a shimmering moiré effect. Ultimately, even with these ties to specific Iranian and Western traditions, Shafie’s constructions evoke sensations of optical pleasure and discovery that knit together cultural vocabularies.

--Sarah Parrish

It is commonly stated that Cubist artworks are the result of combining multiple views of a single object. But what does this really entail? Few have answered this question with as much complexity and depth as Aithan Shapira. Shapira’s life has always encompassed multiple viewpoints—some lived (time spent with an Aboriginal tribe in Australia) and some inherited (his mother a refugee of Iraq and ten generations of his father’s family in Jerusalem).

Shapira’s practice concerns both memory (experienced and inherited) and his place in a lineage of artistic tradition. Hungerford Bridge in London was first painted by Claude Monet in 1899, when it was still called Charing Cross Bridge. In his print Hungerford Bridge (2009), Shapira transforms Monet’s en plein air rapidity into a measured consideration of the elements of the scene, including not only what is visually present but also a historic and symbolic assessment of the bridge’s components.

Collography, the printmaking method that Shapira utilizes in this instance, entails the artist gluing diverse materials to a cardboard backing. This collaged plate is then inked and run through a press. The results are highly textured prints. Even in the monochromatic Hungerford Bridge we witness a rich range of deep, velvety tones and gauzy gray clouds, as well as sketchier, rougher passages. By using a collage technique, Shapira harkens back to the Cubists, who began to incorporate bits of found material into their paintings, but his scale is much larger. Combining multiple prints to form a grid more than six feet high and nearly nine feet wide, these works confront the viewer with a powerful experience of simultaneity.

--Kelly Presutti

The first Cubists, Picasso and Braque, worked out a coded language between themselves, a mode of pictorial communication where the slightest curve could register as an absinthe glass and a circle crossed with lines could signify a guitar. Shapira has his own system of visual signs, and certain figures recur again and again—a candelabra, a life preserver, a ladder. Open Studio Curtain (2011) is a reprinting of a 2007 collograph, Before the Carnival. Yet just as the tone in which something is said can alter its meaning, here a shift in colors has transformed a brooding scene into a brightly lit interior. While Shapira encourages perceptual attentiveness, he also asks us to consider the malleability of language and the ways in which the same object can take on vastly different meanings depending on one’s viewpoint.

--Kelly Presutti

Since the late 1990s, Kate Shepherd has developed a rigorous and analytical style of abstract painting. Her meticulous explorations of the mechanics of painting and the language of abstraction are fused with careful consideration of earlier investigations of the medium and conception by others––from Piet Mondrian to Agnes Martin, Robert Mangold, and Donald Judd. Working in oil and enamel on wood panels, Shepherd produces handsome orchestrations of shape, structure, surface, edge, space, color, and line.

Shepherd begins by preparing the panels with multiple layers of high-gloss enamel. Presented in varying sizes, the paintings are human scale, echoing a doorway or an open window. Their surfaces are a highly refined saturation of a single mesmerizing and nostalgia-inducing color: brick red, forest green, or midnight blue. The glossy surfaces reflect the available light to capture the movement of viewers and the still details of the surrounding space.

On top of these dense and striking pools of unbroken color, Shepherd draws in oil very thin gray or white lines that are neutral and airy. In long, deliberate, precise gestures, she creates her primary imagery: a delicate network of intersecting lines that angle this way and that throughout the picture plane. The lines describe architectural spaces, scaffolds, buildings, grids, and nets. The Etch-A-Sketch-like structure in Blue Debris (2010), for example, is convincing as a three-dimensional form from afar, but quickly flattens to an absorbing abstraction up close. By using found and computer-generated configurations, Shepherd employs a mixture of improvisational and fixed patterning to draw out a playground for her, and our, ideas and metaphors.

In her studio practice, Shepherd sets and follows a stringent set of guidelines and utilizes a consistent vocabulary of color and line, chance and gesture. The resulting paintings are elegant, generous, efficient, and strong. They unromantically reverberate within the vast history of abstraction while tackling the immensity and fragility of the space we inhabit.

--Alison J. Hatcher

Haim Steinbach, like many artists in the late 1970s and early 1980s, felt that painting, originality, and subjective creation were exhausted, and turned his attention to mass-produced objects circulating in daily life. From store shelves and tag sales, he began to select objects of interest — a new pair of sneakers, a lava lamp, a rubber Kong dog toy, a ceramic soup tureen shaped like a cabbage — and arrange them on carefully constructed shelves. In his groupings, seemingly divergent items — or series of items — evoke uncanny connections through their formal resonances, historical and social allusions, and shared status as commodities. Steinbach's artistic practice of selection and presentation leverages consumer desire and commodity relations to reexamine the status of art. He recognizes the agency of everyday things and sets out to explore and intensify the effects of things on viewers.

In Untitled (travel bag) (2012), Steinbach places an iconic blue Pan Am travel bag on a glass shelf in a plain wooden frame attached to the wall. The display alludes to the Minimalist wall sculptures of Donald Judd while disquietingly merging a museum frame with a shelf in a store, thereby equating high art with its lowly cousin, commodity. Inside, he places a single bag made from the synthetic material PVC (polyvinyl chloride) by the U.S. airline Pan American World Airways ("Pan Am"), which pioneered the concept of modern air travel. The company's retro globe logo, which covers the face of the bag and repeats across zipper pulls and tassels, recalls the late 1960s, a time when Pan Am reached its zenith and carried millions of passengers a year to all parts of the world. With its practical pockets and carry-on size, the bag is an artifact, as well as a symbol, of our globalized world, where bodies, things, and capital move freely. By choosing and framing this single bag, Steinbach focuses attention on it as a physical object and as a sign or simulacrum, a reference to an imagined reality. His placement of the dark blue, dome-like form near the center of the square, isolated from the rest of the world, simultaneously evokes a religious portrait, perhaps of the Virgin Mary, and a high-end designer display. It is the space, or lack thereof, between such extremes—religion and capitalism, the unique and the multiple, art and commodity—that interests Steinbach. His artworks speak in a bizarre and mundane language of things taken from the world and given back to the world anew.

--Ruth Erickson

Hank Willis Thomas explores the perception and presentation of African Americans in popular culture through a photography-based practice that exploits the very visual language of contemporary media. Underscoring what W. E. B. Du Bois termed the “double consciousness” of African American identity—the condition of seeing oneself reflected through the (often negative) perspective of others—Thomas employs doubling, mirroring, and pairing as his key compositional and conceptual tools. In doing so, he further underscores his medium’s ingrained capacity to replicate imagery and implicates photography and its commercial use in forming and deforming black American identity.

The Cotton Bowl (2011) is a succinct and sharply symmetrical pairing of two men in the guises of a post-slavery era sharecropper and modern-day football player. The field’s line of scrimmage separates and mirrors the past and present, under a century apart, as both figures crouch in identical positions, picking cotton and in a three-point football stance. Thomas articulates a clear parallel between contemporary sports and agriculture’s legacy of slavery as two industries fueled by the bodies and labor of African Americans. In his work, he often critiques the culture of sports and its ancillary marketing industry for its use and depiction of the black male body as a site for profit. The juxtaposition in The Cotton Bowl visualizes this troubled relationship between race and sports in the United States, chastising the latter for its exploitation of young men through a culture that hinges on spectacle and a violence whose depth is only now becoming public.

Exploring and exposing undercurrents of racial bias within our ever-absorbing media environment, Thomas asks us to consider the present and past in new light. “Ultimately,” the artist explains, “my goal is to subvert the common perception of ‘black history’ as somehow separate from American history.”

--Dina Deitsch

Click here to view Hank Willis Thomas’s insights on this work. 

Fred Tomaselli is a contemporary painter known for incorporating a wide range of unorthodox materials—from prescription pills and hallucinogenic plants to images cut from magazines and books. In his paintings, he arranges these bits into elaborate and kaleidoscopic motifs that recall cosmic events, biomorphic forms, and indigenous decorative patterns before he seals them in a thick layer of clear epoxy. Strata of pigment and imagery seem suspended in space and time, drawing viewers into complex, sumptuous compositions.

Around 2009, Tomaselli began a series of works that take the front page of the New York Times as the starting point. He screen prints a section of the front page onto watercolor paper and then uses gouache paint to alter and reinterpret the press photographs. Tomaselli's signature motifs mask and reveal parts of the image to generate evocative compositions that play with the surrounding text. In May 2, 2011, the lead headline announces that U.S. forces have killed Osama Bin Laden, whom a lower headline describes as "an emblem of evil in the U.S., an icon to the cause of terror." Between these two headlines, a single hand emerges from the center of an azure blue spiral in a field of blue and green spirals. The image resembles the hand of God, a motif frequently found in Christian and Jewish art to indicate God's involvement in and approval of earthly acts. We learn from the caption that the original image was a still from one of the many videos Bin Laden made and distributed to publicize his menacing plans (commanded, according to Bin Laden, by God). Tomaselli thus transmutes Bin Laden's own hand into a symbol of divine intervention in the killing of Bin Laden. Such an intricate and contradictory circuit of signification reflects the difficulties of the War on Terror.

Tomaselli's newspaper works complicate relations between image and text. The pictures no longer serve simply to illustrate the accompanying story, but rather to obscure, expand, or introduce alternative and sometimes subversive ideas. In Jan. 26, 2013, he repaints a massive barrier in Cairo to resemble colorful, childlike blocks that Egyptian demonstrators are attempting to topple. 

--Ruth Erickson

In July 25, 2012, he covers a photograph of Syrians fleeing the ancient city of Aleppo with a blue star pattern resembling the adornment found in historic mosques that face the threat of wartime destruction. Tomaselli's artistic reinterpretations of the front page render the fleeting nature of the news into something timely, enduring, and heartbreakingly beautiful.

--Ruth Erickson

After extensive study of birds and tortoises from islands of the Galapagos in the early 1830s, Charles Darwin produced the scientific theory of evolution he referred to as natural selection. Because the tortoises had evolved separately from one another for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years, Darwin could tell which were from what island based on the shape of their shells. In June of 2012, Lonesome George, the last Pinta Island tortoise and the rarest creature in the world, died at the Galapagos National Park. The extinction of this indigenous tortoise subspecies, the subject of Juan Travieso’s Lonesome George (2013), was caused in large part by the decimation of vegetation by goats that had become feral after being introduced to the island. The event underscores Darwin’s interest in evolutionary issues of influence, struggle, temporality, and new structures for understanding life.

Travieso engages these themes through a geometricizing vernacular of realism, portraiture, and abstraction. The protagonists of his vivid paintings have consisted largely of animals in harm’s way, from monkeys used in animal testing to endangered species of bears and birds. Soft—even tender—in their realistic rendering, the faces of these creatures are met by sharp geodesic and pyramidal forms. Geometric accumulations of color bury themselves in feathers and furry coats, extend from beaks, snouts, and animal faces, and dot the landscape like highly chromatic crags.

While the purpose of these works is to raise awareness about endangered animals, paintings like Lonesome George also raise questions about our own evolution. What parts of our culture will we let die off? How will we evolve socially and biologically in an increasingly digital culture? The artist’s pairing of natural forms with lush geometric embellishments points to both technological advancement and impermanence. By picturing creatures in peril, Travieso suggests as much about the vulnerability of the human species as he does about its threat to others.

--Evan J. Garza

Click here to view Juan Travieso's insights on this work.

Sara VanDerBeek’s practice thrives at the juncture of past and present, the ephemeral and the permanent. Previous series were devoted to the creation of sculptures that existed only as long as it took for her to fix them in restrained, carefully composed photographs. Although VanDerBeek now allows her sculptures to have a life beyond the studio, her earlier practice of imposing durational limits on her constructions demonstrates how time itself has always been an essential element of her practice.

As part of her most recent body of work made at the Memmo Foundation in Rome—where she was able to study the monuments as well as the more intimate textures of the ancient city—VanDerBeek created a series of seven photographs called Metal Mirrors. Each is comprised of a close-up of an oxidized metal wall, presented at 8 x 4 feet and laid beneath semi-transparent, tinted and mirrored glass. They encompass the viewer with their scale and reflective surface and are uniquely activated as new subjects glimpse themselves in these minimalist yet painterly objects. The momentary layers of these fleeting images, permeable and evanescent, continue the artist’s temporal exploration, as well as her inquiry into the magic and mechanics of photography.

When first invented in the 1820-30s, the photographic image was a revelation. Still, despite our scientific understanding of the process, the experience of making an image—especially with film—contains equal parts wonder and wish. Like the internal mirror that is essential to VanDerBeek’s SLR film camera, her Metal Mirrors catch and bounce back information. With their veneers of glass, the photographs have become objects themselves, but they also operate as a sort of lens. When caught in their reflection, we see ourselves anew.

VanDerBeek’s Metal Mirrors, with their layers of print, color, and reflection, suggest an alchemical transformation, and themselves represent the cycling of subject and object. Their mirrored surfaces implicate the viewer—in our looking, we are also seen. As VanDerBeek’s works connect us to allusions of history, we are presented over and over with the opportunity to discover ourselves set in present time against a past moment.

--Abigail Ross Goodman

Goddesses of the past often occupy prominent spaces within museum galleries. The female form has served as a dynamic and frequent inspiration from antiquity to the present. In Roman Women X, Sara VanDerBeek contemplates how the body has been presented and contested throughout art history. This photograph belongs to a larger series of works in which the artist represents various ancient sculptural forms reimagined in blue and purple hues. Although her source material now exists in various shades of white stone, the ancient sculptures were originally painted in bright colors. VanDerBeek’s own palette echoes this historical precedent, while simultaneously yielding her own distinctive aesthetic vision.

In regards to her exploration of antiquity, VanDerBeek explains, “I have always had an interest in classical sculpture, and in particular, the photographic reproductions of it that are found in art history anthologies. They are iconographic and symbolic of our ideas of the past and our ideals—but more importantly they are, in their current state, a meeting of times.”[1] Roman Women X was inspired by the artist’s trips to Rome, Naples, and Paris to view Classical and neoclassical sculpture. The artist noted the repetition of poses and figural forms in the sculptures, and identified a relationship between this serial aspect of ancient art and the replication of photographic prints from a single image.

The striking purple hues in this photograph are also evident in other bodies of work by VanDerBeek.[2] This unusual color choice evokes a dream-like state, echoing the artist’s experience while photographing these ancient objects in a spaced steeped in history. Moreover, the perspective of the photograph infuses the image with a fantastical or ethereal quality: the sculptural fragment appears to float within the composition, and the artist intriguingly leaves space above the sculpture where its missing head might appear. Beyond traditional representations of antiquity, VanDerBeek’s photographs inspire consideration of time, place, and space and the construction of iconic imagery.

--Amy Galpin

[1] Andrew M. Goldstein, “Sara VanDerBeek on Making the Classical Past Contemporary,” Artspace, July 30, 2013, accessed August 1, 2014, http://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/sara_vanderbeek_interview.

[2] In the Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, for example, see Metal Mirror II (Magia Naturalis), digital c-print, 2013; Metal Mirror IV (Magia Naturalis), digital c-print, 2013; and Metal Mirror V (Magia Naturalis), digital c-print, 2013.

Charline von Heyl’s works on canvas are calibrated to make viewers conscious of the ways in which they perceive a painting. The German-born, United States–based artist refuses to adhere to a signature style and, each time she takes up her brush, confronts anew how a painting is made, especially with regard to the hierarchy between foreground and background. Her use of color is frequently cacophonous, though occasionally restrained to tease the eye. Von Heyl does not tame her paintings for beauty; rather she trains her viewers to look actively and long enough for the awkward and rebellious aspects of her paintings to give way to intertwined, complex planes of imagery. In attempting to “rewind” a von Heyl painting—to unravel the order of the gestures and marks—viewers are consistently foiled. In maintaining the mystery of her paintings and holding viewers in their thrall, von Heyl wields her power.

“Where to begin?” is a fundamental question asked by anyone trying to describe a von Heyl painting. Our gaze faces the same challenge. In the case of Tipdipso (2013), scrutiny starts in the upper-right corner. A tabbed line, reminiscent of a flagged ribbon or a plan of suburban subdivisions, begins in pure black before it rolls off in brushy plums and jade greens. But from here, all bets are off. Von Heyl’s imagery prompts flashes of recognition—in a harlequin-esque form or a humorous suggestion of an armadillo. At last, the iridescent puzzle-piece layer reveals itself. When we ask what was painted first, we are denied an answer, instead left to ponder myriad possibilities. Such curiosities, erasures, flippant flicks of the brush that are anything but carefree, are the traces of the energetic process that von Heyl enacts each time she comes before a large blank canvas.

Von Heyl has described standing in her studio with a row of vast white surfaces before her, a smorgasbord of infinite possibilities, and the mettle it takes to make that first mark. Looking at her works, one imagines the relief von Heyl must feel when the pristine canvas is no longer screaming and she is able to focus on how to make a painting—what it is to contend with a history so large—in an effort to articulate a space for herself. Over and over again, von Heyl claims space for her works. She refuses definition, categorization, and even too much self-reference (though there is some); she denies our desire for the known, yet she does not embrace the truly unknown either. Von Heyl’s works, her paintings especially, hover on the precipice of recognition, but they do not take sides.

--Abigail Ross Goodman