Our inaugural interview for our series of conversations with young artists is with Roberto Jamora. Over an epic and mind-expanding session, Jamora and I chat about space, surf and what the future holds.

Roberto Jamora, Holdin’ (Surfers Holding Hands), 14″ by 18″. Oil on primed paper, 2009.

CONTINUUM: Could you begin by telling a little about where your studio is these days, what’s the space like?

ROBERTO JAMORA: Right now I’m working at the State University of New York, College about 45 minutes north of Grand Central Station. I have a private studio space on campus at a section of the School of Art+Design for MFA candidates. My space is about 120sqf, maybe bigger, but it always feels small. I can never concentrate on any one project, I always have 5 paintings in progress and there are traces of my process/mess everywhere. It definitely feels ‘worked in’.

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Thomas Øvlisen, Tomato, at Klaus Von Nichtssagend, Installation View, 2012.

What interests me about contemporary forms that mimic the look of their presumed Minimalist predecessors is their ambivalent relationship to the history of that art. It may very well be that no connection exists but in the spectator’s mind, but it’s difficult to deny the John McCracken-ness of Thomas Øvlisen’s new works in Tomato; where his plank-like pieces are very traceable visual echoes. The scale, shapes and propping, however, are where the similarities end, and it becomes not the art historical alliances but the departure from them which activates his works.
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Joseph Montgomery at Laurel Gitlen, Installation View, 2012.

Joseph Montomgery’s work is one which inhabits the space of its process. Montgomery’s solo presentation, Velveteen, reads like a chronology of his experimentations in scale, composition and form. Each work is named in the order of its completion, placing each individual piece in concert with the works which preceded and which follow.

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Catherine Opie, Untitled #2 (Tea Party Rally), 2010. Via ICA

I recently attended a discussion at the ICA in Boston between the museum’s director, Helen Molesworth, the artist Catherine Opie and writer Eileen Myles. The event was to celebrate the opening of Opie’s show, Open and Full, at the museum. Myles was there as a guest and collaborator of Opie’s presumably, but she also added to the fun lesbian town meeting vibe of the talk. This short, hour long conversation and Q/A had more queer women than I have ever seen in one place in Boston, except for designated areas at Pride. It’s of course, not at all surprising, given who Opie is and what her most famous works are about. She has consistently looked at communities: the big versus the small, how they’re created and what the various boundaries and membership rules that define them look like. Her photographs of the leather and S&M communities in San Francisco and LA were her first well-known bodies of work. In her 2008 retrospective at the Guggenheim, she showed images of surfers and high school football players, which was a reminder of her interest in groups other than her own. In Empty and Full, we see her objectively photographing peoples engaged in some form of assembly. The Michigan Womyn’s festival is pictured, as is a field full of the Boy Scouts of America. There are a few images from the gatherings around Obama’s Inauguration and there are Prop 8 protests and Tea Party rallies. One Tea Party image in particular spoke to Molesworth, who described it as, while not giving her a sense of common ground, a feeling of shared humanity with this fraction of America she generally feels disdain for. Opie joked that it was because she couldn’t hear them, which is simply true. But Molesworth insisted that Opie, despite who she is (a segment of society that Molesworth pragmatically points out the Tea Party continually declares war on) has managed to take a picture of the Tea Party that imbues a sense of shared humanity. I take this also to mean that Molesworth sees this image as one that implies a sense of egalitarianism between artist and subject. This statement points out some important functions of Opie’s series and raises questions about the relationship between artist and subject and its manifestations, visual and not, in art.

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From Works in Bronze and Steel at David Zwirner.

The most refined designs exalt primary elements such as light and space, so that the meticulous engineering of architecture is most effective when air and sun permeate it in a way at once natural and supernaturally sublime. John McCracken’s sculptural works achieve this effect with stark formal reductions which at once collapse and expound upon their conceptual foundations. In the strange, reflective luminescence of his surfaces is a microcosm of our universe and those beyond it.

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Lynda Benglis at the New Museum, via Artnet.

In the loosely defined Post-Minimalist moment, Lynda Benglis’ sculptural works suggest a ‘feminizing’ of the artistic process. Benglis’ amorphous blobs reject the serialized regularity of Minimalism, favoring instead materials, processes and forms which are mutable and, to an extent, uncontrollable. The polyurethane, wax and latex often employed by Benglis are the less stable foils to the heavy, polished metals which make up much of the Minimalist geometry. Benglis is the sumptuous answer to that stoicism of form.

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Via Artforum

James Franco’s actual artwork is beside the point, this is clear. Moving forward, what can James Franco’s presence in the art world tell us about the current cultural moment? Franco offers a literal cross over between art and popular culture, a moment Warhol predicted exactly and would probably be immensely enjoying. In our time, the James Deans are not solely the subject; they also get to make the art.

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via contemporary performance

Last weekend choreographer Trajal Harrell’s dazzling performance project “20 Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church (M),” came to the Kitchen in Chelsea.  The work exists in five iterations: Extra Small (XS), Small (S), Medium (M), Large (L), and Extra Large (XL).  The piece was conceived during the artist’s multi-year residency at Workspace Brussels and saw it’s New York premiere back in 2009 at the New Museum as a solo-work (S).  Harrell was invited by the New Museum to perform the piece again in 2010 before it came to the Kitchen last week in it’s  more elaborate current iteration (M).  The performance, in the words of Harrell, explores the question, “What would have happened in 1963 if someone from the voguing ball scene in Harlem had come downtown to perform alongside the early postmoderns at Judson Church?”

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Film still from The Clock, via Artinfo.

Currently on view at The Paula Cooper Gallery is Christian Marclay’s 24-hour video work The Clock. The groundbreaking work examines the passage of time in all its literal, cinematic and symbolic incarnations through a real-time montage culled from thousands of film excerpts which span eras and genres.

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Self Portrait, Via John Maloof Collection

Vivan Maier’s work fills a gap in the history of photography. She sits somewhere between Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” and more traditional notions of street photography and the emotive realm of Arbus portraiture. This is part of the reason why her work, recently discovered through the sale of Maier’s abandoned storage unit just before her death, is so exciting for critics. Her work operates in conversation with established schools of photography, but articulates an altogether new authorial position. She has been posthumously named one of the 20^th century’s most important photographers. Maier’s story is one of artistic obscurity: a factory worker and nanny who photographed constantly in her time off never showing her images to anyone.  However, her work would certainly have been recognized had she shown it in mid-century.

What’s so fascinating about Maier is that she fits perfectly into a moment in American history where photography was being reckoned with, where artists were figuring out how to wield their power. However, she didn’t belong to any important circles nor did she bounce ideas off mentors from the previous generation, as Diane Arbus infamously did with Walker Evans. Her photographs do not reflect her lack of formal education or cultural inclusion,they read like images you may have seen before and have the feel of some “mid century master” that you can’t put your finger on. Maier’s work at first looks recognizable, a “digestion of the history of photography” surmised the curator at the Chicago Cultural Center, which is hosting the first ever exhibition of her work. One realizes quickly however, that Maier’s eye had entirely different intentions than the photographers to whom she is currently being compared.

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