Richard Stipl was born in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and was raised, educated, and now lives and works both in Canada and the Czech Republic. He graduated from the Ontario College of Art in Toronto with an Honours Diploma in 1992, and was awarded Canada’s prestigious Governor General’s Award in the same year.Working initially as a painter, Stipl has recently turned to making sculpture. Using himself as a model, Richard focuses exhaustively on the indefinite nature and moment-to-moment paradoxes inherent in the act of continuously recreating oneself throughout the course of a lifetime. Characteristically, Stipl’s paintings and sculptural works alike force us to reconsider the role of boundaries and consequent categories of choice that comprise contemporary attitudes and approaches to art-making and art-consumption.

Considered an exceptional talent in technical terms, Richard stands apart from his contemporaries through his uncanny ability to breathe a vital and invigorating “life force” into his art works, regardless of media.

Stipl has exhibited in Toronto, Montreal, New York, Miami, Berlin, Los Angeles, Madrid, Stuttgart, and the Czech Republic, and is included in many important public and private collections worldwide. Over the past several years, Richard’s work has captured extensive media and critical attention wherever he has exhibited.

Mortal elements – interview with artist Louise Bourgeois

Like ancient sites abandoned for centuries, Louise Bourgeois’ sculptures remind me of the basic fact of impermanence, yet they can feel as familiar as a recurring dream suddenly recollected. In her installations, psychological relationships among objects are as important as formal ones: this work is sculpture but it is about memory, and the fragility and isolation of the individual–how even a heart of stone is as fragile as a bubble of glass, at the core nothing more than air and dust. Through her use of materials–found objects along with made sculptural elements–Bourgeois creates physical order out of emotional disorder. This is art, not as therapy, but as a transformation of emotion into physical form.

In the conversation that follows, conducted on March 18 at her New York studio, Bourgeois discusses both the work that will be unveiled at the Venice Biennale this summer and the 1992 Documenta installation that preceded it.

LOUISE BOURGEOIS: All of you interviewers flock upon me like birds–to say what? My work is finished; I can’t go through this again. During the BBC film, there were six people around all day. Finally, I’ve succeeded in totally exhausting myself. This is completely unjustified. You people want me to do all the work.

PAT STEIR: That’s what an interview is. . . .

LB: I’m a sculptor, not an entertainer. Or rather, I have discovered that I am an entertainer despite myself. People actually laugh at me, God bless them; I’m rather flattered, but there is a limit.

PS: The piece you displayed last year at Documenta is titled Precious Liquids.

LB: Actually the piece has two titles. Welded in steel over the entrance to its interior is an inscription that says, “Art is a guarantee of sanity.” I did not say that it was the guarantee of sanity. There are lots of others. Art is just one way of reaching an equilibrium–of becoming a sociable person.

PS: What about the bed with the little puddle on it and the glass shapes hovering near it?

LB: Here we are dealing with bodily functions; when we are in a tense state, our muscles tighten; when they relax and the tension goes down, a liquid is released. Intense emotions become physically liquid–a precious liquid. That’s where the title comes from. So it is all a matter of being in touch with that flowing of liquids. I could give you a dozen examples–if you are terribly hungry saliva comes at the sight of a lamb chop. In this piece the liquid is suggested by the glass shapes; some are closed like drops and others, open like funnels, are metaphors for the muscles of the body.

PS: What about the tall coat and the little coat?

LB: The coat represents, you might say, the tragedy of the voyeur.

PS: The flasher, in English?

LB: The French do not have that beautiful word. But yes, he refuses to get out of the place. He’s not a casual presence. He’s a very pestering presence. Inside the flasher’s coat there is a little white dress–the dress of, say, a twelve-year-old girl. That little female presence probably has to do with certain memories of mine. Actually, the person who enters the piece should open the coat and see what is in there. On the little dress there’s the embroidery “mercy merci” . . . at that point we are done with the flasher. He is a compulsive creature.

PS: Precious Liquids is very claustrophobic and dark inside; in the Venice pieces nothing is hidden.

LB: But there is a relation between the new work and Precious Liquids in terms of subject matter; they both involve the story of the unconscious–you have to bear it and, if you are gifted and generous enough, and if you like yourself enough, you will come to terms with it.

PS: One way or the other.

LB: The point is that the unconscious is there to stay, bothering you all the time. But you have to make peace with it. In Precious Liquids the girl, for her own protection, for the sake of her own sanity–we go back to sanity–has to come to terms with the flasher. So she closes her eyes, refuses to see him, and turns the matter around by taking refuge in his coat. This is a metaphor for the artist. If the artist cannot deal with everyday reality, the artist will retreat into his or her unconscious and feel at ease there, limited as it is–and frightening sometimes. But since love excludes fear–this is the deepest interpretation–suddenly if you are in love, you are not afraid anymore. This is amazing, but it is true. The little girl has taken the unconscious, not as an enemy, but as a refuge.

PS: I was interested that the figure in Cell (Arch of Hysteria) is male. It is unusual, because the hysteric was always a woman.

LB: This goes back to Precious Liquids, because this is really about tension, the body. The fact that it is a man is not terribly important. It is a remark about the hysterical, and in the time of Jean Martin Charcot, any ill, any disease, was attributed to hysteria, to be precise, and hysteria was attributed to women, which was absurd. This is all it means.

PS: So it’s just a little feminist humor on the way. But I’m still curious about the hysteric as a man.

LB: Yes, well, you are asking too much. If you say, Louise, How is it that this is next to that; what’s the relation? if you ask me precise questions about the visual, I prefer this to the interpretative attitude of the art critic. It’s very rare to find somebody who is able to bring a piece alive, through description, instead of making pronouncements. So it’s art journalism that I respect. I’m all in favor of art journalism.

PS: |Laughter~

LB: You’re really an inquisitive person. So I’ll tell you first of all that the large object in Cell (Arch of Hysteria) is a saw; you know arms were cut, heads were cut; we needed a saw for that, right? And you don’t have to know exactly what, but something vibrates in you; you see that everything has been cut, so you cut the poor creature, because you have been cut off from your past. It is a move from the passive to the active. In my art I’m the murderer. You understand? Besides this disease |hysteria~ was in fashion at the time of the Industrial Revolution.

PS: I want to know why the objects in the found chairs in Cell (Glass Spheres and Hands) are glass bubbles and not figures. There are so many figures elsewhere in your work.

LB: The glass suggests the infinite fragility of the human person. The artist retreats into the handling of materials, because any materials–marble, bronze, plaster, wax, plastic–are less fragile than human relationships. If I talk to you, I may break everything. But, that’s not my fault; I can be very, very sorry afterwards. But a break in a piece of glass can never be hidden.

PS: |Laughter~

LB: They are transparent bubbles. They’re enclosed; you do not get at them. They are sealed off without the possibility of communication and yet they are together. This is a very pessimistic situation. Suppose I want this person to love me and–they’re a bubble, I have no access; I’m unable to make myself heard or loved. Family of Five is also like a school, a learning situation. Well, this is personal, because I have taught, you know, and that has been my experience.

PS: And the marble hands?

LB: I clasp my hands in despair. Artists are not taught, they are made, they happen by accident; so I despair because I have no impact on them.

PS: When I first saw Cell (Choisy), I thought that the house was mounted on a sewing-machine stand.

LB: It’s a 19th-century workbench. I find this period of the end of the 19th century–the period of Charcot, the Salpetriere, you know–mysterious. You find these beautiful machines abandoned here in New York: I like the connection, because it is, in a way, a historical piece.

PS: I was wondering also about the house itself. Is it your childhood home?

LB: Yes.

PS: How did you choose pink marble?

LB: Because its color suggests flesh. The marble in many of my recent pieces relates to flesh. It is very difficult to get pink marble. It’s called portugalo, and usually the pink color is ruined by green veins. I can’t accept that. So, this marble is very special.

PS: Are there rooms inside?

LB: Yes, this is an exact reproduction. I could show you where my parents’ room was, with the terrace. I could show you my room, which wasn’t so nice.

PS: You have the guillotine here over the house.

LB: The house represents the past. I go there, it’s demolished. It was replaced by the Paul Eluard theater. The mayor of the little city said, Louise, I am going to put your piece in a park near the town hall; the French government placed a commission with me. It is a tiny place, but at least nobody’s going to come and replace it with a high-rise. The demolition of the house means that the present destroys the past–cuts it, breaks with it. Oh yes, the idea of cutting is terrible. The guillotine appears all the time in my work–remember that poor guy the hysteric; he had no more arms, nothing.

Viewfinder: ‘Seven Abreast in Good Order’ (2006) byMichael Whittle

Alastair Sooke on a tiny work of great skill

From the exquisite miniatures of the Elizabethan court painter Nicholas Hilliard, to William Blake’s dusky painting The Ghost of a Flea, to the infinitesimal intricacies of Fabergé eggs: for centuries, artists have loved working on a very small scale.

The seven knights reproduced here, meticulously drawn by 30-year-old British artist Michael Whittle, are no more than 8cm high from the tips of their head-dresses to their horses’ hooves. To create such minuscule detail with unerring accuracy, Whittle used a Rotring architect’s pen, which he compares to “drawing with needles”. “There’s no change in the weight of line,” he says, “so you have to look twice to see if it’s a drawing or a print.”

Prints, in fact, inspired the work. “I was doing research into heraldic emblems,” he explains, “and I came across a book of woodcuts for the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, who commissioned loads from Albrecht Dürer and other big names in Germany at the time. My knights are inspired by a print of a triumphal procession in Maximilian’s memory.”

Whittle’s drawings are on display at the Jerwood Space in south London, part of a group show that opened yesterday devoted to artists “dealing with notions of the miniature”. Also on show is Swarm, an eerie installation by another young British artist, Tessa Farmer, that consists of a host of microscopic, skeletal “fairies” fashioned from tree roots riding on the backs of dragonflies, beetles and wasps. It’s a tiny vision of the apocalypse.

Existence – Illusion. In collaboration with Arch. Pierre Andre’ Podbielski

Existence – Illusion
in collaboration with Arch. Pierre André Podbielski

within: Rethinking: space time architecture ­ A dialogue between art and architecture.
Parallel to XXI World Congress of Architecture – UIA Berlin 2002

My work fouses the relationship between man and nature. Culture is chosen to represent architectural culture in which man lives and acts, anc charcoal is chosen to represent nature, the last appearance of the trees that stand with us in the world. It is a self-evident truth that I can think of a great number of meanings and forms because of architectural structures being dependent on usefulness and charcoal being one of the last appearances of nature. I thikit is wrong when man in western developed culture draws every center of the world, including the whole order of the universe, to humanity.
Bahk Seon-Ghi

The project ­ shared with the Lawrence Rubin Gallery, Milan ­ is created by Bahk Seonghi in collaboration with P.A. Podbielski for “Rethinking: space, time, architecture” and concerns the relationship between man and nature, between European culture, in which the man predominates the nature, and the oriental culture, in which the man still feels part of the nature.
The site-specific installation “Existence – Illusion” exploits the disposition of Artinprogress Gallery’s space on two levels connected by an area of double hight. On the ground floor and in the highest area the visitor enters inside a colonnade alluding to the classical architecture. The descending staircase to the inferior level connects the European culture with the culture of the country of Bahk’s origins: The threes and the various decorative elements at the basement are referring to the oriental gardens. Both landscapes are realized with coal pieces suspended by nylon threads from the ceiling that form fragile structures alluding to the caducity of the human material culture.

Bahk Seonghi is born 1966 in SunSan (South Korea); since 1995 he lives and works in Milan.
Hes work has been shown in many solo and group exhibitions, among which:
2001 “No Human”, Arsenale Thetis, Venice; Galleria Lawrence Rubin, Milan;
2000 “Arte si parte”, Fondazione Sirssu, Lugano (CH); 1999 “Salon of Natural Artists”, Musée National de l’Histoire Naturelle, Paris, “Passaggi a nord-est” Città dell’Arte, Biella (I); 1998 “Periscopio 1998″, Cascina Roma, San Donato Milanese (I).

GERHARD MAYER AT UTE PARDUHN GALERIE
“Orakel”

24.01.2008 – 13.03.2008

Der Künstler Gerhard Mayer hat in der Galerie Parduhn eine großformatige Wandarbeit installiert. Entstanden nach strengen Spielregeln, entfalten Mayers Arbeiten eine Formenvielfalt, in denen das Regelwerk allenfalls als geheimnisvolle Ordnung hinter unendlichen Möglichkeiten fühlbar wird.Daneben zeigt er Collagen aus verschiedenen Puzzles, deren starkfarbige Oberflächen auf den ersten Blick wie dicke, pastose Malereien wirken. Im Über- und Nebeneinandersetzen der „Pixel” sucht er nach Ähnlichkeiten in Struktur und Farbigkeit, die das einzelne Element verwandeln und zu einem vieldeutigen neuen Bild werden lassen.

www.galerie-parduhn.de

Rules for the drawings:
1. Each drawing can only be made with the same size ellipse.
2. The ellipses must always lie in the horizontal.
3. The ellipses may not transect the edge of the paper.
4. A complete ellipse may not be drawn.
5. In each position of the ellipse stencil at least three lines
x.xmust be generated.
6. Only lines may be generated, not points.Additionally, for the small drawings:
7. Every sheet of paper measures 34.3 x 43.4 cm.Additionally, for the color drawings:

8. Seven colors or more must be used for each drawing.

www.thesanchezbrothers.com

“My primary project has always been in finding ways to make the viewer aware of their own activity of looking at something.”In this quote by German-born photographer Uta Barth, she concisely states her artistic intentions. By using the conventions of photography (composition, lighting, focus, depth of field, etc.) and our expectations of those conventions, Barth makes photographs that shift our attention away from what is pictured to visual perception itself.

These pairs of photographs come from two different series made between 1999 and 2000 set in the artist’s living room. The choice of her home as the subject for these series was not for any biographical purpose, but instead to use the mundane and everyday in order to remove reference and meaning. Untitled (NW 17) from the “nowhere near” series, is one of hundreds of virtually identical photographs the artist shot of the view from her living room window over a period of nine months. In each of the final series of twenty pictures, the nondescript suburban backyard is seen through the latticework of the window frame at slightly different angles and at varying times of night and day. The use of a shallow depth of field blurs the background while rendering a palpable clarity to the window’s surface.

In Untitled (aot 2) from the “…and of time” series, the artist turned her attention to the interior of the room to focus on the play of light and shadow on the bare walls and carpeted floor. In these images, as one looks from one to the other, the slight and subtle differences become apparent as the latticework of the window now produces patterns of light. The process of looking at these paired pictures results in a visual sense of silence and the passage of time.

It is hard to imagine subject matter that is less compelling than a living room floor or a bleak backyard. However, they are the perfect subjects for Barth’s explorations of perception and the impossibility of separating the “reality” of something from how it is perceived. Without narrative, chronology, or other apparent meaning, Barth’s photographs are, in the words of one curator, a “study in sameness that attempts to reduce all activity and purpose to pure observation.”

- Jennifer Bayles, Educator for Special Projects

BROOKLYN MUSEUM: ‘THE EYE OF THE ARTIST: THE WORK OF DEVORAH SPERBER’

The marvelously zany installation artist Devorah Sperber recreates classics with a pizazz that breathes new life into familiar, even hackneyed images. Her latest exhibition, installed in a roomy mezzanine gallery at the Brooklyn Museum, applies this formula to paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, Picasso and Jan van Eyck, among others. This time the images are remade using thousands of spools of colored thread arranged in seemingly abstract patterns that suddenly pull into focus when viewed through a circular device resembling a crystal ball. There is a reproduction of Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein dressed in a suit and looking much like a man, made using 5,024 spools of thread, and a life-size re-creation of Leonardo’s “Last Supper” made from 20,736 spools of thread. (Above, “After the Mona Lisa 1,” 2005). These works boggle the mind and entrance; they might even make you say “wow.” As much about art as about tical device, like the human eye, inverts imagery. From a few feet away, they look like fields of vague, pixilated color. But through the optical device, you see a perfect reproduction of the paintings. It’s like magic. (Through May 6, 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park, 718-638-500museum.org. ) BENJAMIN GENOCCHIO

SCULPTURE MAGAZINE

Feature Article
May 2006 Issue”The Art of Seeing”
A Conversation with Devorah Sperber
by Ana Finel Honigman

After Dali, After Harmon, 2003-04. Chenille stems and mixed media frames, installation view.

Art is primarily a visual medium, yet most artists take the experience of sight for granted. Devorah Sperber does not. The New York-based artist probes the optical, social and historical reasons for why we see what we see. Sperber takes well-known images that are widely reproduced and represents them in an original sculpture which must be appreciated visually in order to be understood. In this way, she undermines the process Walter Benjamin claimed corrupts art’s authenticity and kills its ‘aura’ in the age of mechanical reproduction.

In practice, Sperber’s work functions on three interrelated levels simultaneously. From a distance, her works are attractive abstractions. Up close, her unexpected materials (pen caps, brightly coloured pipe cleaners and spools of thread) are endearing and playful. But only when her images are seen through the optical devices she includes in their presentation does the provocative final layer emerge and the image it represents become clear. Through this evolution, a process that can not be summed up through mundane reproduction, Sperber successfully disrupts and then refocuses our perception of familiar images; forcing us to reconsider how we interpret visual information and how we look at art. In a 2004 solo exhibition at the McKenzie Fine Art gallery, Sperber recreated Hans Holbein’s iconic 1533 painting, The Ambassadors, by using thousands of chenille stems stitched into a circular rug. The sculpture seems like a drab piece of modernist decoration until Holbein’s image, known for its own anamorphic trick, becomes visible in the cylindrical mirror cutting through the rug’s centre. This combination of references and affects challenges our expectations of both the neutral sculptural form and the famous painting itself, enlivening and refreshingly connecting them.

Similarly, in a 2001 group show at the James Graham and Sons gallery curated by Valerie McKenzie, Sperber presented Lie Like a Rug (2000-2001), 18,000 pen caps pushed into a curving flexible canvas, whose Persian rug pattern emerged when the sculpture was seen through a nearby convex mirror. Like the Holbein piece, this sculpture initially disassembles and then convincingly restores the complicated heritage that summons commonplace images into view.

“The Eye of the Artist: The Work of Devorah Sperber,” an exhibition featuring full-scale re-creations of Leonardo’s Last Supper and Mona Lisa, will be shown at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2007.

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Reflections, 2003-04. 60,000 spools of thread and 23 convex mirrors, each wall 10 x 60 ft. View of work installed at the Centro Medico Train Station, San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Ana Finel Honigman: How does the process of visually dissecting and reconstructing historical works of art affect your relationship to them as a viewer?

Devorah Sperber: My artistic process is highly compartmentalized. It includes countless hours of research, planning and preparation, which affect my relationship to both the historical work and the resulting new work. Once assembly begins, I’m already finished in a sense, with most of the decisions and problem solving behind me. At this point I have such a clear vision of the completed work in my mind, that when I first see the finished work, I have a strange sense of Déjà vu.” This was particularly poignant when I recently installed “Reflections,” a large-scale commissioned work constructed from 60,000 spools of thread, in a train station in Puerto Rico. After working on the project for 15 months, I could not see it with “fresh eyes” and had to assess the work by gauging other people’s responses to it.

AFH: How do you think this experience would differ if you were appropriating these works in paintings or collages instead of translating them from two-dimensional images into sculpture?

DS: I don’t think of my series based on historical works as appropriation. The catalyst was a site-specific installation, “Quartered, Flipped, & Rotated” (2004), which I developed for the Montclair Art Museum two years earlier. Curated by Patterson Sims, the installation was based on the museum’s iconic Edward Hopper Painting Coast Guard Station (1929) and connected the museum’s collection of American and Native American holdings. My decision to use other historical works as subject matters evolved from my interest in the link between art and technology through the ages, and my own working processes, which utilize technologies of our era–the computer, optical devices, and mass-produced objects. The selected historical works have significant links to science or technology (some well known, others obscure). I focus on those aspects when translating images into new sculptural works.

AFH: How are you defining appropriation and how does your use of pre-existing imagery differ?

DS: In the context of visual art, I define appropriation as “art about art.” My work focuses on the intersection of art, science, and technology and their influence on “the art of seeing.” AFH: What is the “art of seeing?” Do you mean the way viewer interpretation affects the meaning of a work?

DS: I am interested in how the human brain makes sense of the visual world and “reality” as a subjective experience. As a visual artist, I cannot think of a topic more interesting and yet so basic than the “art of seeing.” AFH: Your series After Dali, After Harmon 1, 2003-2004 was inspired by a known experiment on optics and memory. Can you describe the particulars? DS: This series was based on a Salvador Dali painting from 1976, which was based on an early pixilated image created by Leon Harmon of Bell Labs. The original black and white image was included in an article in a 1973 issue of Scientific American, titled “The Recognition of Faces.” The image and the experiment was a demonstration of the minimum conditions needed to recognize a face. Through the use of incremental cropping and changing scale, the series “After Dali, After Harmon” takes it one step further. When seen in its entirety, the series functions as a neurological primer, literally priming the brain to make sense of visual imagery, which is only recognizable when seen in the context of the greater whole.

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Shag Rug 165,000 (After Pollock), 2002. 165,000 2-in. chenille stems and foam board, 96 x 192 x 3 in.

AFH: How does your work relate to the experience of seeing in contrast to say, a painting dealing with similar issues, such as a Chuck Close’s grid portrait?

DS: Chuck Close’s grid portraits are installed in a traditional way, first offering viewers an overview of the portraits from a distance, with the image gradually dissolving into abstract cells as they move closer. My large-scale works reverse this traditional process of viewing art, bypassing the overview or macro-perspective and offering in its place an incomprehensible micro-perspective of individual units (such as spools of thread) devoid of recognizable imagery. Viewers experience a dramatic moment of surprise when they become aware of the macro-view, visible only with the aid of small optical devices. This element of surprise, best described as the “WOW” experience, is the result of temporal lobe activation, which occurs when the external world does not jive with the brain’s inner expectation.

AFH: What issues arise from offering the experience of seeing the same thing in two separate and distinct ways through the use of sculptural elements?

DS: Offering two distinct versions of reality illustrates the limitations of visual perception and presents reality as a subjective experience vs. an absolute truth. It demonstrates that the visual world, as perceived by the human eye and brain, consists of a miniscule layer of scale-based perception existing within infinite layers of imperceptible realities.

AFH: What do you think of how your sculptures appear in photographs?

DS: It is difficult to accurately portray my work with a single photographic image. I generally prefer a combination of images: a close-up view, a full installation view, and/or a view of the work as seen reflected in an optical device. Sometimes, a mid-range view is necessary to link the micro and macro views, especially when people have not seen my work in person. The size of the photograph is also important as it affects whether the focus is on the full recognizable image or on the individual units.

AFH: How do you select the images you reference?

DS: My initial interest in any subject matter is intuitive. I then conduct research to access whether the subject matter has enough interesting layers to justify producing a work based on it.

AFH: When you say “layers” are you referring to content, like the potential socio-political content in a mass-produced oriental carpet or the historical content of a famous painting or are you describing visual variety?

DS: Selecting my subject matter is a complicated process. After I find a group of images that appeal to me on an intuitive level, each image undergoes a rigorous justification process. I am looking for a reason to pursue one idea over others.

AFH: Does the familiarity viewers might have with a work affect the way you conceptualize and contextualize it?

DS: Most of my work is accessible to both the art-going and general public. However, in some cases, if viewers are familiar with the subject matter, they will likely appreciate additional layers of meaning. For example, viewers familiar with Jackson Pollock’s work will appreciate the humor intended in recreating a drip painting using 165,000 pipe cleaners. What they may not know is that in each successive drip painting, Pollock created higher and higher ratios of fractals, before fractals were recognized as existing in the natural world. This was a deciding factor in using Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm as a subject matter.

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After Holbein, 2003-04. Chenille stems, mixed-medium platform, and polished stainless steel cyinder, 76 x 76 x 31 in. After Holbein (skull), 2003-04. Chenille stems and mixed-media frame, 18.5 x 103 x 2 in.

AFH: How do you feel the meaning or significance of an image changes when it is frequently reproduced?

DS: Reproductions of historical works can become inaccurately fixed in the mind’s eye. Take the Mona Lisa for example, perhaps the most famous painting in the world. Most people have seen a reproduction or a “reproduction of a reproduction,” but only a small percentage of those people has actually seen the painting in person. I suspect most people are surprised when they see the original painting and experience the relatively small scale (30 x 20 7/8″) and the subtle effects of Mona Lisa’s elusive smile. I am currently working on a life-sized rendering of the Mona Lisa. Constructed from only 425 spools of thread, the image resolution will be extremely low. Yet when seen with an optical device, the thread spools will condense into a blurred yet recognizable image, conveying how little information the brain needs to make sense of visually imagery, like Harmon’s pixilated image of Lincoln. Another larger thread-spool work will reintroduce an aspect of the original painting which is absent in most reproductions-the effects of spatial frequencies on vision as it relates to Mona Lisa’s elusive smile. These works will debut in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in June 2005 in an exhibition curated by Marilyn Kushner of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, who is interested in the intersection of digital technology and printmaking.

AFH: What are the differences for you between creating a work from the image of a factory-made carpet versus reconfiguring Holbein’s The Ambassadors?

DS: I don’t see a significant difference. Both works have links to technology. “Lie Like a Rug” was inspired by a rug which has been in my family since the 1950s. My research uncovered an interesting technological fact about the origin of that particular rug pattern. Although it looks like a hand-made Persian rug, the pattern is modeled after the world’s first power-loomed rug manufactured by Karastan in the USA continuously since 1928.

AFH: And the Holbein?

DS: Two works titled “After Holbein” were based on Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors (1533). In order to create the elongated skull, Holbein either utilized anamorphic perspective, a mathematical technology invented by Leonardo da Vinci, or an optical device as suggested by David Hockney in his book “Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters.” These works debuted at McKenzie Fine Art, NYC in 2004 in an exhibition that included a thread-spool work based on Vermeer’s presumed use of the camera obscura and the series “After Dali, After Harmon”. All of these works have a significant link to technology.

AFH: How has your process changed since when you began using technology in your work?

DS: At the beginning, I spent weeks translating images into individual units of color. I now have a custom software program that reduces the time I spend at the computer and allows me to spend more time in the studio.

AFH: As your work demonstrates, science and art are closely linked, and always have been, yet there is a general assumption that science is not creative and art is not as “serious”. Why do you think there is still a division perceived between science and art?

DS: The modern division of art and science may be the result of technological advancements and resulting job specialization. Intuition/creativity and awareness of the world play important roles in both art and science. If there is a perception that art isn’t as serious as science, it may be due to science’s more tangible value to society.

AFH: So, you are focusing on seeing as it functions biologically instead of intellectually, since one could argue that the subjective experience of seeing is determined more by experience, information and assumptions than optics?

DS: I like the holographic model of reality in which raw perceptual data is input, filtered, and organized by the brain to create a holographic illusion of a solid, predictable universe. Our understanding of what we see is based on the holographic model we have built to date. Using this model, brain biology and function are interconnected.

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VW Bus: Shower Power, 2001. 60,000 colored film stickers on vinyl shower curtains, aluminum hanging apparatus, and convex mirrors, 80 x 63 x 136 in.

AFH: Would you say that you approach the actual act of making your sculptures scientifically?

DS: My approach to research and development can be seen as scientific but the actual assembly process is totally meditative. Assembly is my delayed gratification for the countless hours spent thinking, researching, planning, and problem solving. Life doesn’t get more simple then declaring “I will complete X number of rows today” and having the wherewithal to do it.

AFH: Why do you often select mediums that are often banal or playful in their origins, like thread or brightly colored pipe-cleaners?

DS: The contrast between subject matter and medium adds another element of surprise to the work. In general I select materials based on their aesthetic qualities, intrinsic characteristics, availability, and the range of colors. I place equal emphasis on the “whole” recognizable image and how the individual parts function as abstract elements.

AFH: Yet, sometimes your materials conceptually compliment your subject matter like when you crafted a life-size replica of a 1967 VW bus using over laser-cut 60,000 flower-power stickers, hand-applied onto clear vinyl shower curtains. At other times, your choice of material and scale is highly incongruous. What determines whether you want your medium to contrast or reinforce your subject’s symbolism?

DS:”VW Bus: Shower Power,” a life size, 3D rendering of a 1967 VW Bus, was inspired by my long-standing love of VW buses and my own retro VW Bus. My choice of medium, 60,000 flower-power stickers applied onto clear vinyl shower curtains, was inspired by the common description of a VW Bus as a “box on wheels.” When viewed up-close, the translucent flowers in the foreground fade in and out of recognition as the eyes shift focus from the front panels through to the rear panels on the opposite side of the bus. The end result is an image of a VW Bus that is there yet not there, solid yet transparent, present yet fleeting, not unlike the ideals of the 60s in the minds of many Baby Boomers today.

AFH: What was it about the myth of the 1960s that inspired that exhibition?

DS: “Bikinis, Bandanas and a VW Bus” debuted at Graham Gallery in NYC in March 2002. The concept was based on the continuing presence of cultural icons from the 1960s and 70s. As David Brooks has noted in his book, Bobos in Paradise, these icons continue to have a strong presence in contemporary culture due to the influence of “Counter-Culture Capitalist” baby boomers now in positions of power as CEOs, advertising executives, and designers.

AFH: How did you try to represent the tensions between 1960’s ideology and the current aestheticization or commercialization of those beliefs?

DS: The bikinis and bandanas were constructed from thousands of maptacks inserted in clear vinyl, and have an undulating, cloth-like appearance from a distance and a surprisingly menacing quality up close. At first glance, all of the works appear to be 3D but on closer inspection, some are actually 3D while others are entirely flat. The bikini patterned as the American flag first emerged in popular culture during the 1970s. Seen today, it can be read as either patriotic or subversive depending on the direction of the maptacks which face inward on some bikinis and outward on others and also, of course, on the perspective of the viewer .

Ana Honigman is a critic and PhD candidate in art history at Oxford University

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