Art Basel Miami Beach 2022: Troy Lamarr Chew II, Simon Denny, Liam Everett, Chris Johanson, Shinpei Kusanagi, Lynn Hershman Leeson, K.R.M. Mooney, Alex Olson, Trevor Paglen, Kikuo Saito, Sara VanDerBeek, Didier William

Trevor Paglen lives and works between New York and Berlin. Paglen mines the history of photography, both for its physical production and its subject matter, to construct questions around seeing. Concerns around surveillance, privacy, freedom, and servitude resonate throughout his practice. Ultimately, he poses the question: what is the relationship between photography and power? For Paglen, the ramifications of emergent technology are more than strictly sociopolitical. His work has considered the extent to which artificial intelligence is invested in the very nature of opticality through this shift towards hard-edged, quantified forms of seeing.

 

The coloration of Near Rock Point Deep Semantic Image Segments is a result of Deep Saliency, a way of using computer vision to analyze photographs using Artificial Intelligence. Machine learning or Artificial Intelligence applications “train” a neural network using thousands or millions of images, so that the network can develop its own tools to analyze those images. Deep Saliency differentiates between sections, areas, or different types of objects in an image as interpreted by criteria it has created for itself. The resulting image, swirling clouds in soft pinks, purples, and oranges, is aesthetically beautiful as a result of its technical complexity.

Alex Olson lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Through the use of color, layering, and texture – both in terms of three-dimensional impasto and implications within visual patterning – she controls surface tensions in at once a meticulous and playful manner. Layers appear to peel away to reveal other layers, suggesting several paintings embedded in one, some of which remain forever concealed. Pulling from both historical abstraction and contemporary design, Olson’s paintings consider the juggling act between the eye and the brain to parse out evidence and desires, sources, and analysis, past and present.

 

In Slant, “a tan/cream top portion of horizontal and vertical brushstrokes form the appearance of a shadow that cuts across the canvas. This is most visible from looking at the work at an angle. The bottom portion of 3 bars of color continues the allusion to light and shadow but with rendered colors. These bars suggest alternative surfaces/possibilities, peeling away to reveal others. This is a painting in transition from one form to another.”

Troy Lamarr Chew II lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. The artist’s rich visual language draws heavy inspiration from hip hop culture. His work looks methodically at systems of coded communication and how this is translated and mistranslated within the African diaspora and throughout the mainstream. A highly skilled realist inspired by European painting techniques, Chew utilizes these art historical traditions to underscore their exclusion of Blackness.

 

Part of his Out the Mud series, the artist’s most recent painting, Dying to Live, references kpokpoi, or country cloth, from Bo, Sierra Leone. This is a thick material traditionally made from locally grown cotton that is spun into thread, dyed, and woven into strips on a tripod loom. Historically regarded as a sign of wealth or prestige, Chew combines this material with painted figures from contemporary rap culture as a means to explore the hip-hop ideal of starting from nothing.

Liam Everett lives and works in Sebastopol, CA. Everett has established the studio as a site of both investigation and rehearsal. His practice is mediated by a set of open-ended, continually shifting questions. Rather than offering definitive answers, however, Everett’s paintings contemplate the influence of gesture, material, and obstruction. They also serve as records of their material encounters.

 

Interested in conceptualizing the horizon, Everett’s newest paintings consider the notion of borders as both an endpoint and a source of curiosity. Each painting contains a pair of two white bars on opposing sides, directing the viewer’s attention to the work’s horizon while creating the sense that something is missing or that we are limited in our scope. The resulting absurdity speaks to the sense of playfulness found in the midst of challenging or difficult periods.

Chris Johanson lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and Portland, OR. A central figure of San Francisco’s Mission School, the post-punk movement that integrated aspects of both graffiti and folk art, Johanson’s multidimensional practice encompasses painting, drawing, sculpture, design, and music. Incorporating disparate influences that underscore the complexity of life, his work is centered upon themes that include spirituality, sociology, and environmental observation.

 

Johanson’s painting Arther and Darin and Harmony exemplifies the artist’s use of bright colors and figuration as a means of social documentary. Amidst a swirling background, in which recognizable shapes intermingle with color fields, two figures sit across from one another, hands clasped. This work belies both the meditative qualities of Johanson’s practice, and his ability to communicate sincerely through painting.

Over the last five decades, Lynn Hershman Leeson has been internationally acclaimed for her art and films. One of the most influential media artists, Hershman Leeson's innovative work investigates issues that are now recognized as key to the workings of society: the relationship between humans and technology, identity, surveillance, and the use of media as a tool of empowerment against censorship and political repression. She has made pioneering contributions to the fields of photography, video, film, performance, installation and interactive as well as net-based media art throughout her career.

 

With a focus on identity, Roberta’s Construction Chart 1 represents the artist’s careful consideration of the multitude of personae which make up the self. This seminal work is an instruction manual detailing how the artist transformed herself into this alter-ego: the mask of makeup became the interface between the artist’s identity and fictional character’s.

Shinpei Kusanagi lives and works in Tokyo, Japan. Utilizing a technique reminiscent of traditional Japanese nijimi, Kusanagi stains untreated canvas with layers of translucent color. Incorporating improvisational brushstrokes in vivid hues, the compositions hover on the surface and then recede into deep space. These atmospheric washes of color leave the paintings devoid of specific detail, conjuring memories of time and place rather than a precise representation.

 

Rather than envisioning what the finished work would look like in this newest body of work, Kusanagi remained present by allowing the painting to develop organically. As a result, his canvases change in surprising ways as they accumulate new layers of information.

 

Sara VanDerBeek lives and works in New York. Through experimentation with photography and sculpture, she considers how these particular media, often associated with the solidification of subjects in time, can be destabilized. She ultimately asks: how do we represent and see something that is in flux? VanDerBeek materializes this predicament by enlivening archives of objects and images. This process allows her to incorporate a range of overlapping temporal, optical, and ontological schema in her work.In doing so, she actively reconsiders the physical, historically grounded space of sculpture and photography, repositioning her subject matter, often women, within novel, unstable, and transformative visual fields.

 

VanDerBeek’s recent work, Future Variations, explores her ambivalence towards classical ideals of female beauty. Mining her archive of photographs from encyclopedic and historic museums, VanDerBeek hand colored her own image. The work’s bright colors and refractive paints evoke the jewel-toned palate of the makeup aisle. Obscuring the figure’s form rather than revealing, her gestures create traces of movement which bely the artist’s continued mediation of the female form.

Simon Denny lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Intrigued by the intersection of technology, society, and aesthetics, Denny sources the material for his work from the objects, documents, and images produced by technology corporations and states. Exhibiting his works as case studies based upon factual events, Denny maps out key economic and cultural behaviors within the technology industry and examines how these impact aspects of capitalism, the internet, surveillance, and data mining. For Denny, physical space and the virtual realities constructed by corporations are not distinct entities. Rather, the entanglement of these spaces has become a key point of discourse throughout his oeuvre.