portfolio: natalie a edwards

From my review:

“Smith’s pastel-primary-fluorescent paintings could pass for an acid-trip grandma’s precision-heavy quilt (if quilts were made of paper and gouache), or a petri-dish of magnified-pointillist bacteria (if bacteria were perfectly circular and extra psychedelic).”

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Carl says:

“Lost in the woods? Just come back from some mystical journey? Just got back from war? Just got back from killing everyone you know? Like to tap dance on flying swords? I like paintings about that. But to have all of that in one painting is something I don’t see. So I try to get as much of it in with my own work.”

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From my article in F Newsmagazine:

“Art critic Jerry Saltz has challenged the inflammatory, paranoia-inspiring Fox News talk show host Glenn Beck to an art duel. Saltz would like Beck, who recently attacked the public art on Rockefeller Plaza, to curate two art exhibitions: one of images or actual works of art that exist in New York City which Beck would like to see demolished, and another show featuring contemporary art he approves of. “In the spirit of bi-partisanship,” wrote Saltz, he would “secure a first-rate New York venue for each exhibition,” and would write about each show in New York magazine.”

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Excerpt from my feature on Art Talk Chicago:

“On one fall evening, year after year, Peoria street fills with Generation Google-Its in search of free booze and someone to flirt with. They ride the trolley to River North to feel alienated by the grown-up art in the spacious galleries. They are disappointed with the sparse selection of wine in plastic cups and mounds of sweaty cheese cubes atop wilted lettuce, and they quickly return to the West Loop. It is on this day of the year that they don their best duds: a sloppy boustier, perhaps, fashioned out of leather scraps. A skinned rodent pelt delicately placed atop a shaved head. A tuxedo. And it is on this day that they squeeze through corridors to make sense of the bold and sometimes baffling choices that our Chicago galleries make.”

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From my profile of Chicago artist Gregory Jacobsen:

Flags in butts, drippy cunts, shit beaks, and fleshy chunks of meat caught in seemingly intimate moments: these are the images Chicago artist and musician Gregory Jacobsen chooses to render in his awkward acrylic, confidently sensual world. “I was always interested in weird, fucked-up imagery and I always made ‘shocking’ little pictures,” Jacobsen says, “but it took me a while to really push it in a direction where it transcended ‘shock-art.’”

I rip Matthew Barney a new taint. Just kidding:
For the four people out there that aren’t familiar with Matthew Barney and the Cremaster Cycle, let me give you a quick rundown so you don’t look like an idiot when you go to your Teaching Assistant’s Valentine’s Day party and everyone’s talking about their cremasters. Matthew Barney, love him or hate him, has had a tremendous impact on the world of Modern Art, if only because everyone says so. He has been called “the most important American artist of his generation because his imagination is so big” by Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times, alternatively, the joke about the Cremaster Cycle is that the trailers are arguably the best part, distilling about seven hours of striking visuals into manageable minutes. In five independent cinematic ventures, Barney builds a phosphorescent, lubricated world with its own logic.

read more ball-talk…

http://fnewsmagazine.com/2007-apr/the-crusade-to-save-artists–asses.php

From an interview with Barbara Degenevieve where she cooked me scrambled eggs:

Barabara says, “The ACLU told me that I was their ideal visual artist witness. My work is sexually explicit and if COPA (Child Online Protection Act) was to be put into effect, I could be in a lot of trouble, like being prosecuted, fined and imprisoned. A good portion of my work is sexually explicit: male nudes and sexually explicit text, language and video, not necessarily female nudes except for brief clips in Desperado. So if a child came to my website, because the child would be able to access my work without age verification, I would be liable for causing ‘harm to minors.’”

If you’re into boring interviews with unpopular women:

“I think the art scene in Chicago suffers from a Second City mentality. Having grown up as a New Yorker and having become a Chicagoan, I have always been amazed at how weirdly Chicagoans relate to NY. It’s such a love/hate relationship but nonetheless one that ends up making Chicago feel inferior. If Chicago would simply accept that its scale can never rival or equal that of New York’s but that there are terrific artists, curators, gallerists, museums and the best Art Schools in the country, Chicago could simply feel proud of what it has and encourage the range of experimentation that makes it unique. There is a confidence issue here that Chicago needs to overcome.”

Read on…

A bad show on a bad night:

“The world needs another review of the MCA’s birthday party, Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967, like I need another hole in my head, and for this I apologize. But every review I’ve read is boring and excruciatingly balanced. All the critics seem to say different variations of the same thing: “This show is kinda good and kinda bad. Happy birthday.” Why is everyone afraid to hurt the MCA’s feelings? Why is everyone not talking about the boring, stupid, shoe-gazing elephant in the room? I fear no art, as the MCA would say, and I also fear no art institution; I will say it: Sympathy for the Devil is like a huge, sorta pretentious, cold, burgerless, Aerosmithless Hard Rock Cafe.”

read the rest. Why not?

Kind of mean of me:

“Bruce Noel Mortenson–like many contemporary artists–is a collector of arbitrary images: figures he makes up (like two-headed monsters), doodles (like you might find in a middle school students’ carefully considered spiral-bound notebook),  cultural icons (like the Rubik’s Cube), and the rare contemporary art references. Mortenson’s menagerie of congested, brightly colored compositions are easy to dismiss as decorative high-brow doodlery. The hippy-dippy, day-glo-synthetic swirlings of his paintings, combined with the pseudo-spiritual titles he gives them (the show is titled Journey into the Realm), don’t exactly encourage the viewer to take him seriously.”

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