"Human beings have been living in isolation since surviving in caves
-- many drawing on their walls --
now in 2020 most bravestly."
Peter Alan, 2020
-- many drawing on their walls --
now in 2020 most bravestly."
Peter Alan, 2020
Private Commissioned Mural for Monica and Luca | "Brazilian Sunrise" | 2021
Monica and Luca invited and encouraged to lend their creative hand
into the early developing process of the mural to add personal value.
into the early developing process of the mural to add personal value.
Documenting stage process
"Brazilian Sunrise" Mural | 2021 | 48" x 84" | acrylic, pen, crayon, enamel, collage, A&B VOC-free resin on plywood panel |
Commissioned Private Collector, Monica Funchi, Glen Ellen, CA
"Brazilian Sunrise - study" | 2021 | 12" x 19" | remnant Wildfire ash and acrylic on paper | Private Collector. Monica Funchi, Glen Ellen, CA
For Emily
"untitled study" | 2021 | mixed media on paper | Private Collector, Emily Elise Halpern, Los Angeles, CA
Rachel Wolfe: mixed media artworks and projects | 2020
"her gaze (my ideas for T-shirts)", 2020
P-20-008 "her gaze (my ideas for T-shirts)" | 2020 | 10" x 7" | mixed media on paper | Private Collector : Rachel Wolfe, USA and Norway
in process stage 2
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in process stage 3
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Couple months ago, Rachel mentioned that she was
working on some concepts for T-shirts. Agreeing that would contribute some of my own concepts, I began writing them on a piece of paper. That piece of paper is now "her gaze (my ideas for T-shirts)".
working on some concepts for T-shirts. Agreeing that would contribute some of my own concepts, I began writing them on a piece of paper. That piece of paper is now "her gaze (my ideas for T-shirts)".
"gaze 2 (non-reproducible)", 2020
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Revisiting the context and theory of “the gaze” -- as did DaVinci, Vermeer, Manet, Klimt, Kahlo and many other artists in their own ways -- Rachel’s portrait imagery meets quintessentially. Her eye-sight is fixed and directed at you as her captive audience, while “castrating or penetrating” [Dyer, 1992], you as the beguiled viewer fixates on her high-caliber pulchritude. As if held hostage, her emotive longing mood reveals mysterious truths resonating from her dynamic essence.
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Collected remnant fire debris on paper, household paint, and the brushes and latex gloves used to lay down VOC-free A&B resin.
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Upon merging paths with Rachel Wolfe on Facebook, I was immediately struck by her powerful portrait imagery. Visually apparent. Potent. Becoming extraordinary colleagues and friends, I started to sketch her portrait. Eventually, I combined the graphite and pen medium with printed ink-jet transfers and gesso. Realizing these 3 initial portraits would be my main focuses for elaborated mixed media Assemblage, I reinstated my former fire art “studies” from the “Wildfire” series, 2018-19 investigating beauty and order from old adversity of the Wildfire, while coping with new adversity throughout a pandemic.
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In 2018,
I met a family visiting from Czechoslovakia at my art studio. While sharing some dialog over translation, I tinkered with "fire art" on paper, brushing on resin, and wearing latex gloves. “Cool or dense = hustý; tinker = dráteník”. Putting down my brush, peeling off the gloves, I took some notes, These things as "found objects" now can be found in their new version.
Through Experimental and Constructivism puzzle-piecing the former “fire art” studies on paper with her portraits now complete, the stark and opaque white gesso gave its compositional surface a cleanup, pushing the covered-up ash and debris into a disguised context as a more unbeknownst coarse “surface field”. Reasoning: I am overall complete and done with my traumatic history of the Nuns Wildfire jacking my previous home and art, I don’t need to keep reminding myself nor audience of the loss – not constructive nor effective. Course, as we are bombarded with the pandemic business of COVID 19, and with the CA Wildfire season in gear, the “fire art” content fits into my continual context of coarse textural adversity. Then this art piece is to about Rachel, and our inter-personal history in the making.
Concurrently working with a separate commissioned project, these surfaces further developed through depicted random “noise” of letters, numbers, words, the latex glove (the new public litter), remnant paint-can lids (‘can’t put a lid on it’) and iconic American Symbolism. E.g. the “flag” motif connoting Patriotism has been a signature icon from my “911” [2001-03] and “Wildfire” series [2017-2019] -- mostly as a compositional devices of socio-cultural reorganization. So what does American Patriotism look like now?
Concurrently working with a separate commissioned project, these surfaces further developed through depicted random “noise” of letters, numbers, words, the latex glove (the new public litter), remnant paint-can lids (‘can’t put a lid on it’) and iconic American Symbolism. E.g. the “flag” motif connoting Patriotism has been a signature icon from my “911” [2001-03] and “Wildfire” series [2017-2019] -- mostly as a compositional devices of socio-cultural reorganization. So what does American Patriotism look like now?
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Including reclaimed & tinkered cardboard for an Industrial Art Povre context gave way to also increase its scale, as well as support the future resin pour, and means to hang. Then I needed ‘more of hand into it’ with color and elements to make a profound and sensitive statement. Subsequently, I opted to move forward by drawing in a labyrinth-like maze. Rachel has a very busy mind with dynamic complexity. The stencil was difficult and aesthetically unsuccessful with such high-relief. Drawing by hand was just a difficult achieving clean concise contours. Yet I meticulously and neurotically stuck with the process, intentional to create a “game” for the viewer to follow the maze. Subsequently, eliciting closer investigation of the details, the viewer's objective is to arrive at her portraits as the destination.
The VOC-free A&B resin pour with pigment gave the surface further heightened detail, but it also robbed the piece of its light, making it dull and overall somewhat regrettable and disappointing. Perhaps paper and resin do not match well archivally.
Feeling a lot of work had already been put into the piece, and with a ways to go, I went back in with white gesso to brighten the surface. Then, back to the neurotic and meticulous obsession mode! Drawing in contours and text with a sharpie pen, random words, zero’s and ones, catch-phrases and dissertations reflect the kind of banter and particular shared interests with Rachel. And all to turn up the “volume” of the chaotic and absurd pandemic “noise”, but with a playful spin poking at myself. Our condition and circumstances out there are serious enough.
Liminal:
“crossingover” space – a space where something has been left behind, yet not yet fully in something else.
“crossingover” space – a space where something has been left behind, yet not yet fully in something else.
P-20-009 - gaze 2 (non-reproducible) 2020 | 36” x 36” | remnant “fire art” debris, gesso, acrylic paint, graphite, pen and marker, enamel spray paint, stencil, latex glove, paint brush, tape and VOC-free A&B resin and pigment on mixed paper types, mounted on reclaimed packing cardboard. Private original collector: Rachel Wolfe, Norway and USA.
‘Press to play’ into a kind of psychological landscape set upon a coarsely high-relief texture field, presently crossing over past historical uses, now in a new form and presentation. Much has been covered up and lost, but there’s enough “organized” chaotic visual and conceptual “noise” of adversity intrusively inundating your brain. With the “flat” and smooth aesthetic of Rachel’s portrait as your destination, follow the irrational maze as a paradox, read the script, see the words, investigate the dynamic and absurdly ironic details seemingly out of context.
Welcome to the realm of Rachel Wolfe, and my representational testimony of our shared similarities functioning as highly cerebral creatures. Both of us with Astrological Virgo energies, our minds process a great deal of generating and repeating projections -- as “beings having a human experience” [Chardin]. We live in a world to also assess, analyze and rationalize much meaning and significance supported by the systemic and co-reliant media machine. She is remarkably pro-active in the meaning and significance seduction – and further impressive throughout her Academia knowledge-seeking worldly “A-Z” facts important to her creative work. The maze also serves as a fun-time game, conducive to counter the unenjoyable political media “canon” of our unprecedented pandemic times.
PA
Welcome to the realm of Rachel Wolfe, and my representational testimony of our shared similarities functioning as highly cerebral creatures. Both of us with Astrological Virgo energies, our minds process a great deal of generating and repeating projections -- as “beings having a human experience” [Chardin]. We live in a world to also assess, analyze and rationalize much meaning and significance supported by the systemic and co-reliant media machine. She is remarkably pro-active in the meaning and significance seduction – and further impressive throughout her Academia knowledge-seeking worldly “A-Z” facts important to her creative work. The maze also serves as a fun-time game, conducive to counter the unenjoyable political media “canon” of our unprecedented pandemic times.
PA
Security blanket (troubleweed), 2015-2020
Rachel Wolfe, "Installation with Security blanket (troubleweed)" | 2015 | nstallation | Bolsky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA | traveling object | Materials: photographic print on bathing towel (troubleweed), wooden monkey, dried roses, clear plexi, twine, golden clamps, cotton bags of salt labeled “take me.” A few left with visitors attending the exhibition.
"The installation explores symbolic and literal functions of narrative. Symbolic objects specifically arranged to materialise ideas, or cognitive “things”: Boundary, Grief, Security, Transparency, and Choice.
Troubleweed (photographic print on bathing towel) was sent via USPS & photographed by artists, continuing the installations thematic elements: Trust, Transparency, Choice, Cooperation, Resource. The tumbleweed, as an associated symbol of the western desert, found its way into the Los Angeles River during a drought. During a time of environmental drought, the representation of a prickly ball on a soft surface continued to travel across the United States, depicted by artists in their location and within the relationship of their praxis of art and ways of living.
The traveling Troubleweed bathing towel looks at the question: Can an inanimate object traveling through space and time, via the interdependent wills of artists offer insight into the values which constitute a nation?
After the installation transformed into an ongoing body of work, the archive became an accumulation of bodies of labor, in the time of the internet, where communication and the quality of sincerity is questioned to exist and critiqued as sentimental. The travel archive and final resting place of the work, extends the original metaphor and metaphysical propositions of the original installation.
There were no time constraints on the project. The premise of not having a time constraint looks at the line or levy of personal will. The USPS, once carried by horse and now by horse power and machine sorting assistants, still require the human as critical points within a functional system. The project works as an aggregate of an experiment. At each destination, the towel encounters photographic documentation. The act of imaging as a personal motive and labor are made as free choice.
As much as records provide proof, the archive seeks to underline the existence of motives rooted in: care, play, trust, and free-will, within systems of commodity and capital. Connecting people across Time (zones) and Space (geography), factors often considered to destroy human bonds, the Troubleweed bathing towel project reveal the peculiar value ascribed to an inanimate object is not in the object itself, but in the intangible values that constitute its traverse through Space and Time. As Douglas Adams once described in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: a towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.
Troubleweed (photographic print on bathing towel) was sent via USPS & photographed by artists, continuing the installations thematic elements: Trust, Transparency, Choice, Cooperation, Resource. The tumbleweed, as an associated symbol of the western desert, found its way into the Los Angeles River during a drought. During a time of environmental drought, the representation of a prickly ball on a soft surface continued to travel across the United States, depicted by artists in their location and within the relationship of their praxis of art and ways of living.
The traveling Troubleweed bathing towel looks at the question: Can an inanimate object traveling through space and time, via the interdependent wills of artists offer insight into the values which constitute a nation?
After the installation transformed into an ongoing body of work, the archive became an accumulation of bodies of labor, in the time of the internet, where communication and the quality of sincerity is questioned to exist and critiqued as sentimental. The travel archive and final resting place of the work, extends the original metaphor and metaphysical propositions of the original installation.
There were no time constraints on the project. The premise of not having a time constraint looks at the line or levy of personal will. The USPS, once carried by horse and now by horse power and machine sorting assistants, still require the human as critical points within a functional system. The project works as an aggregate of an experiment. At each destination, the towel encounters photographic documentation. The act of imaging as a personal motive and labor are made as free choice.
As much as records provide proof, the archive seeks to underline the existence of motives rooted in: care, play, trust, and free-will, within systems of commodity and capital. Connecting people across Time (zones) and Space (geography), factors often considered to destroy human bonds, the Troubleweed bathing towel project reveal the peculiar value ascribed to an inanimate object is not in the object itself, but in the intangible values that constitute its traverse through Space and Time. As Douglas Adams once described in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: a towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.
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In August, 2020 Troubleweed bathing towel hitchhiked through the labors of artists, and found its resting place in Santa Rosa, California, where the towel found a home with mixed media artist, Peter Alan. Alas the story inevitably continues, though outside the parameters of surveillance the record of archives the traveling component of this work imposed ." Rachel Wolfe
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Altered version and function
Nicknamed "Myk" [soft, Norwegian], the towel rests on my bed as a blanket; then also gets hung from my dresser.
Nicknamed "Myk" [soft, Norwegian], the towel rests on my bed as a blanket; then also gets hung from my dresser.
FINAL RESTING PLACE II
mixed media Assemblage artpiece project
mixed media Assemblage artpiece project
Upon receiving Rachel's shipped USPS package, I soon after received insight to make an Assemblage mixed media piece to extend my appreciation of the infamous traveling towel.
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I rarely throw away anything that may be
"useful" to make art. And definitely not for this very personal occasion. |
From two mixed media art works made for Rachel, this 3rd one is for me. An homage.
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in stage process 5
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Troubleweed towel: Final Resting Place (content) | 2020 | 36" x 28" | collaged: Rachel Wolfe "Movement" print and business card, cardboard pieces, envelope shipper with text and stickers, pen and ink markers, lettuce product label, paint splatters and metal bolts mounted on cardboard. Privately and personally collected: Peter Alan, Santa Rosa, CA.
Troubleweed towel: Final Resting Place (packaging) | 2020 | 22" x 28" | plastic wrapping, tape, labels and stickers with printed "Final Resting Place" image tinkered with Sharpie pen mounted on cardboard. Privately and personally collected: Peter Alan, SR, CA.
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D-0086 --THE SCI-FI ADVENTURES OF ALLIE AND ATARI | 2020 | 14" x 18" (framed) | pen and ink markers on paper | Private Collectors: Mike and Lisa Sloat, Santa Rosa, CA
