Artists to Watch -- Kerry Skarbakka

Kerry Skarbakka

Kerry Skarbakka's dramatically gestured imagery, is quite the contemporary take on the art of posing.  In his series, The Struggle to Right Oneself, Skarbakka's photographs of himself performing back bowing maneuvers are both a physical and aesthetic accomplishment, placing the edgy and rugged muscular movements found in, perhaps, vert-ramp skateboarding into a context of Escheresquely defined gravity, where subjects are broadly stepping across vertical walls, up balconies, off of verandas and bridges, or simply through windows.  These might seem the stills of a very masochistic stuntman on the set, but they are in point of fact feats of photography and convey strong ideas.  

Against the backdrop of visually beautiful, if not ordinary scenes, are impossible, yet casual gymnastics performed by everyman type characters -- resonating Skarbakka's inherent theme that everyday life is a death-defying act. Referencing  the crucifixion and 70's action sitcom stunts in turn, the characters seem self sacrificial for no apparent reason.  When falling from a building, Skarbakka's subject's gestures do not imply intention or defeat, as in a suicide attempt.  They instead exude a composure of certainty and tense comfort, like cats aware that they will land on their feet.  The cathartic resolution then is not shown but implied by the finely captured gestures of the actor/artist.  Death is defied ultimately, even if the risk of life never really had to be there in the first place, as in the apartment bound robe clad chef in Kitchen.   Further reading then implies that the edge traversed so closely is not physical in nature but mental, what we see is not what the characters are doing -- it is how they are feeling.  In creating the incredibly kinetic stills, Skarbakka is perhaps risking his own life and limb to convey, ultimately through metaphor of gesture, what it feels like to dread the ordinary moments in our day to day affairs, and to recognize that that struggle alone makes all of us fall guys.  For further viewing, visit http://www.skarbakka.com/portfolios/struggle.htm. 

Artists to Watch -- Glenn Brown

Glenn Brown

If ever a painter showcased the melted flesh of humanity's imperfection, Glenn Brown might be him.  If ever a hidden vault of portraits of the corrupt souls of famous paintings' subjects existed in some cluttered closet, Glenn Brown might have painted them.  If he had been available to paint Hurd Hatfield's portrait he surely would have jumped at the opportunity, but does this define Brown's work or even begin to characterize its effect?

Looking at the broad range of his images one could not say for sure.  As if skinned and captured, many of Brown's portraits are grippingly objectionable, but so tastefully and masterfully rendered that they exhibit naught but the highest aesthetic sense behind them.  Initially appearing to be mixed and crossed tube-squeezed markings of oil, expression unabashedly emerges from the faces in portrait.  In each, Brown has cut out a figure in the carpet from seemingly chaotic strokes.  The impressions are undeniable and unlike any other artist's work, and thus call for a new reading of facial interpretation -- that of the subtlest recognition of what peers at us -- whether it has eyes and all those other features or simply gaping holes where they might have been.  Through the unrecognizable sometimes the universal is more clearly shown

Artists to Watch -- John Stezaker

John Stezaker

A natural visual wit, John Stezaker isn't merely collaging two photographs of disparate persons – he is unveiling to the viewer a preexisting and undiscovered presence through the careful manipulation of the most human of human impressions, the face.  The notion of identity is intensely distorted in Stezaker’s ingeniously partitioned imagery.  If a face is the stamp of the soul, then what happens when one’s most revealing features are wedged into another’s?  A chaos of identity ensues and the familiar becomes immediately alien.

 

Thus, we find looking at us – in terribly uncomfortable grins and oddly flirtatious eyes – the unmixed yin and yang of otherwise typically glamorous visages.  Stezaker excavates from the vintage headshots of Hollywood actors and actresses a grotesque retardation without altering a single feature.  Behind this apparent effortlessness lies the unique vision of the artist, whose innate sense of cropping, composition and collage ushers in a highly aesthetic series of images amazingly shocking for how straightforward their assemblage is.     

 

For further viewing, visit: http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/john_stezaker.htm

Artists to Watch -- John Sanchez

John Sanchez

Throughout the gradually all-consuming encroachment of the Industrial Revolution and its unaesthetic progeny, art has slowly shied away from the sentimental representation of the cities and everyday scenes in which we exist.  Darkening over time from the bright heyday of the Impressionists’ take on Paris and the French countryside, to Hopper’s epochal modern era Nighthawks, the perception of our manmade environments seems to have taken – according to the art of the twentieth century – a final turn towards utter disenchantment. 

Enter John Sanchez and his softly focused streetscapes of dewy asphalt and diffused lights.  In them, we see a resurrection of lost sweetness from the retired flesh of the dismal.  The late night vistas capture what many dreamy denizens who have spent countless hours behind the wheel of a car waiting, perhaps, for a light to turn green, have felt on certain nostalgic nights – the cathartic romance of a certain resignation to one’s trapped circumstance.  In doing so, Sanchez returns us to the perspective that our world is, to this day, charmed.

For more viewing visit: http://dorschgallery.com/artist/5

Artists to Watch -- Vanessa McKnight

Vanessa McKnight

Producing a photo-realistic representation can be a very non-contemporary venture for most artists, lacking the edgy and heterodox elements that define so many painters of the contemporary canon. There are those, however, who capture the quivering and discreet kinesis of events so carefully that the result pushes the boundary of one's perception.  Through her varied works, Vanessa McKnight places herself among those whose talent and forward-looking aesthetic have given them such liberty as to paint what they see, without being illustrators.  Like Richter's or Rosenquist's, McKnight's images seem to shift ever so slightly when looked upon, as if the subjects were allowed an imperceptible micrometre of movement within their permanently fixed place.

The draw of McKnight's work is further augmented by the scenes she has chosen to paint.  Often capturing moments anticipating an explosive burst or a highly stressed yet silent epiphany, the emotions and events conveyed lend to a sense of tremendous tension -- the subject only restrained from action by the mere fact of it being bound within a two-dimensional artifact.  The style and renderings of McKnight's works seem to be used only to the end that they give life to what we see -- no extraneous or pretentious strokes are made -- and thus the artist is hiding behind the curtain while her production independently exists before us, qualifying her implied belief that, as Oscar Wilde states, "To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim."

For further viewing visit: vanessamcknight.com.

Artists to Watch -- Justin Craun

Justin Craun

Justin Craun skirts the periphery of his medium by committing his talents to meticulously tousled visuals engendering at once elements of cubism, surrealism and photo-realism.  His multiple-personality attack on the canvas clues the viewer into a self-imposed conflict of intent within the painter, showing that he is not satisfied in simply producing highly skilled, surreal, photo-realist renderings of snap-shots on canvas.  To the contrary, as his own first critic, he seems to turn on his creations and elevate them to the kinetic pieces we see. Carefully deranging features and thus magnifying their haunted qualities, Craun unveils dark truths about his subjects through distortions which come across as x-rays of the skinless anatomy of life itself.  Glowing eyes, exposed enlarged teeth, insouciant children colored in negative -- these are the sufferings, slings and arrows of Craun's people presented in bold palettes some critics find objectionable.  Nevertheless, like so many controversial artists of the past, Craun is beautifully corrupting the specific -- his paintings -- for the sake of purifying the general -- art itself.  

For further viewing visit: http://www.fredericksfreisergallery.com/artists/craun/index.html.

Artists to Watch -- Kate Clark

Kate Clark

Not considering the elusive technique used in crafting her mangy and patched creatures, Kate Clark has endued with static life beings embodying what may be the end result of humanity's fate according to Darwin -- the physical dominance of mankind's beastly nature capped by his face fraught with disbelief at what natural selection has dealt him.

The sculptures beg the question: What is the relationship between man and beast?  In all but contemporary thought, nature was the feared and man was its victim.  However, we are now the aggressors as a species, destroying habitats and forsaking ecosystems by virtue of the mere spread of civilization.  Perhaps Clark is then, in turn, telling a different story. One of the sensitivity and awareness of animal -- hinting, through the carefully rendered and intense gazes, that the so called "beasts" of Earth are more "human" than Homo sapiens themselves, being the present day martyrs of man's latest communal crime -- the comprehensive usurping of our stead.  The feared or disrespected beasts of old are now the victims of the broken pact of symbiosis, and thus in Clark's sculptures a face of humanity is shown on the taxidermied and sacrificial body of our fellow mammals.

In terms of their finish and in spite of their moral inferences, Kate Clark's creations wear girlish stylings of glamorous, glittery embroidery around the stitches of the patched faces. In doing so, the sculptures venture deeply into the grotesque, a feature that Thomas Mann posits is the "most genuine style" of the modern. If so, it is the formative style of the contemporary and Clark's pieces make efficient use of it.

For more viewing visit: http://www.kateclark.com .