Christine Nobel

New notes

2019

y painting practice began with subverting the idea of a still life to create an absurd experience where the presence of carefully observed and exaggerated absurd forms painted from l...

Jessica Houston’s most recent works look north. What is north? Where is it? Is it a fixed place, or something else? Her second solo show at Art Mûr brings together paintings, a sound sculpture, and chine collé prints, all of which reveal a fragile, fluid, and often fractured, north. An iron ore stone becomes a speaker, playing recordings of interviews and singing, and expanding the physical presence of the stone. The exaggerated textures of the paintings give them, too, a sculptural and documentary feel. They record how actions—breaking and piercing, pushing and pulling—disrupt and transform the paintings’ surfaces. By resembling patterns one finds in the wild—scratches across the surface of a rock, uneven waves that form on melting snow—they unhinge any clear distinction between what is natural and what is made. Made with a printmaking technique that binds together distinct papers, the chine collé prints begin with photographs Houston took of Baffin Island. She then combines the images with coloured paper, creating traces of the process of extracting and replacing parts of a scene, and an equal awareness of both what is present and absent. Some are composed of double circles, like looking through binoculars. In Business As Usual, a decaying interior—peeling wallpaper...

I am primarily a painter of things and my practice has grown out of a process of subverting the genre of still life. For my most recent paintings I have been working in an improvisat...

Jessica Houston’s most recent works look north. What is north? Where is it? Is it a fixed place, or something else? Her second solo show at Art Mûr brings together paintings, a sound sculpture, and chine collé prints, all of which reveal a fragile, fluid, and often fractured, north. An iron ore stone becomes a speaker, playing recordings of interviews and singing, and expanding the physical presence of the stone. The exaggerated textures of the paintings give them, too, a sculptural and documentary feel. They record how actions—breaking and piercing, pushing and pulling—disrupt and transform the paintings’ surfaces. By resembling patterns one finds in the wild—scratches across the surface of a rock, uneven waves that form on melting snow—they unhinge any clear distinction between what is natural and what is made. Made with a printmaking technique that binds together distinct papers, the chine collé prints begin with photographs Houston took of Baffin Island. She then combines the images with coloured paper, creating traces of the process of extracting and replacing parts of a scene, and an equal awareness of both what is present and absent. Some are composed of double circles, like looking through binoculars. In Business As Usual, a decaying interior—peeling wallpaper, a rusted stove—is juxtaposed with the soft glow of a yellow circle. This continues Houston’s ongoing use of colour to question the particulars of perception. Heritage of All, White with Greed and Iron, and The Spaces we Breath, Houston’s titles read like lines of a haiku. Composed as prose, they are also confrontational, mapping out the cultural and environmental impacts of the extraction of resources in the Arctic. We witness scenes of violent decay, and yet simply carry on, like Business As Usual. In What Nations Come and Go a pale purple oval nearly fills the frame, revealing only in the very far right a simple cabin in front of a rocky incline. A similar imposing cloud of colour, this time blue, dominates the landscape in Mapped, Claimed, and Evaluated. The north is just as much an idea as it is a place, and is one that looms large in the Canadian imagination. There are few better examples than Glenn Gould...

Jessica Houston’s most recent works look north. What is north? Where is it? Is it a fixed place, or something else? Her second solo show at Art Mûr brings together paintings, a sound sculpture, and chine collé prints, all of which reveal a fragile, fluid, and often fractured, north. An iron ore stone becomes a speaker, playing recordings of interviews and singing, and expanding the physical presence of the stone. The exaggerated textures of the paintings give them, too, a sculptural and documentary feel. They record how actions—breaking and piercing, pushing and pulling—disrupt and transform the paintings’ surfaces. By resembling patterns one finds in the wild—scratches across the surface of a rock, uneven waves that form on melting snow—they unhinge any clear distinction between what is natural and what is made. Made with a printmaking technique that binds together distinct papers, the chine collé prints begin with photographs Houston took of Baffin Island. She then combines the images with coloured paper, creating traces of the process of extracting and replacing parts of a scene, and an equal awareness of both what is present and absent. Some are composed of double circles, like looking through binoculars. In Business As Usual, a decaying interior—peeling wallpaper...

Jessica Houston’s most recent works look north. What is north? Where is it? Is it a fixed place, or something else? Her second solo show at Art Mûr brings together paintings, a sound sculpture, and chine collé prints, all of which reveal a fragile, fluid, and often fractured, north. An iron ore stone becomes a speaker, playing recordings of interviews and singing, and expanding the physical presence of the stone. The exaggerated textures of the paintings give them, too, a sculptural and documentary feel. They record how actions—breaking and piercing, pushing and pulling—disrupt and transform the paintings’ surfaces. By resembling patterns one finds in the wild—scratches across the surface of a rock, uneven waves that form on melting snow—they unhinge any clear distinction between what is natural and what is made. Made with a printmaking technique that binds together distinct papers, the chine collé prints begin with photographs Houston took of Baffin Island. She then combines the images with coloured paper, creating traces of the process of extracting and replacing parts of a scene, and an equal awareness of both what is present and absent. Some are composed of double circles, like looking through binoculars. In Business As Usual, a decaying interior—peeling wallpaper...

THE OCCUPANT 2020 Paris, France A smaller work done in parallel to a complimentary piece ‘WOMBS, TOMBS, TOOLS,’ which portrays hand-painted serif typeset words ‘THE OCCUPANT.’ A ribbon of black along the base of the work hosts a line which reads: “The offices in the desert vending out futures -- if you had gotten a good one you too would want them all to know -- where our bodies have been.” The work is a commentary on the spaces we inhabit, and how they are all temporary. Paint is acrylic with the exception of the red elements, which are formed with oil paint. The painting is executed on two connected, reclaimed wood panels...

AUSPICE 2020 Paris, France An auspice is a ‘prophetic sign’ which the artist was inspired by. This textured, abstract piece features a lying skull, looking up to the sky...

"Tributaries" by Bonnie Zahn Griffith, Oil and Cold Wax Medium on Wood Panel, 18" x 18" unframed, 20" x 20" framed in a modern black frame with hanging wire included. Known for her p...

This work is from the Wonderment of Otherness series of paintings by New York City-based artist Christopher Stout, whose pronouns are he/him or inclusive they/them. Each work within the Wonderment of Otherness series is a sculptural monochrome painting and is part of the contemporary genre of art referred to as queer abstraction. A statement of practice regarding all of Christopher Stout’s work is that it intends to surround us with the notion of radical joy and a vision of queerness as found in our imaginations. But what do the term queer abstraction mean and represent? In the artist’s own words: “I would suggest that queer abstraction might be most easily defined as activist art about the queer experience that does not employ representation of the human figure. Queer abstraction, along with Black abstraction, feminist abstraction, and even Arte povera are examples of 4 distinct types of sociopolitical protest work birthed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which primarily eschew the use of figuration. In providing additional context, art critic and curator Eric Sutphin theorizes that contemporary artists practicing queer abstraction, 'are in close dialogue with their forbears, and bring to the milieu of queer abstraction a new set of social, economic, and political concerns…including a series of questions: What is the relationship between queerness and formalism? Without explicit political references, how can abstract work transmit the urgency of its content?'” In returning the conversation to the Wonderment of Otherness paintings, each painting in this body of work has been designated as a 'quilt painting' because the central visual element and topography of the works are textile pieces of Belgian linen and cotton sewn together with wire in a manner akin to quilting. It should be noted that quilting here is not a reference to the AIDS quilt, but rather an extension of the tradition of quilting as a form of political art by marginalized people. These quilts are stretched on stacks of wooden panels, so that the works retain elements to suggest being textile pieces, and also elements of being sculptures, and also elements of being paintings. This is a reference to the nonbinary. An equally important concentration within these works is to express a linear relationship between queer abstraction and queer theory. Alongside each painting has been designated a notable academic text, biography, or resource book documenting a spectrum of queer ideas and experiences. Stout noted that, “Some of these books are longtime friends, and some of the more contemporary works were read as part of my research for these paintings.” Whilst these paintings are not designed to illustrate the work of these queer academics, they do hope to activate a through line, manifesting the shared goals within queer abstraction. This painting is titled, Wonderment of Otherness Quilt Painting 001, A Monument to the Work and Queer Personhood of José Esteban Muñoz (which is slightly longer than the 80 characters permitted in the online catalog) and is a monument to the work and Queer personhood of José Esteban Muñoz. Stout painted this piece after re-reading Muñoz’s text, “Cruising Utopia, The Then and There of Queer Futility.” A much-loved quote from this book: “Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness’s domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds, queerness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances for the negative and toiling in the present, queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing. Often we can glimpse the worlds proposed and promised by queerness in the realm of the aesthetic. The aesthetic, especially the queer aesthetic, frequently contains blueprints and schemata of a forward-dawning futurity. Both the ornamental and the quotidian can contain a map of the utopia that is Queerness.” ― José Esteban Muñoz ... Process: Stacked wooden panels, on which is stretched a quilt that I fashioned from Belgian linen and cotton fabric sewn together with wire. The finished work is a monochrome painted...

Balancing between abstraction and figurative, the works of Chris Gwaltney (b. 1953) are evocative, luminous, and lush. He balances color with unexpected washes and scribbles; scrapin...

Multilayered, highly textured, shining gold highlights this piece. The rich oils shine through as the light changes throughout the day making this Amrta Art Gold Piece feel alive and...