The concept for painter Lavaughan Jenkins’ new work “Reconstructed Figures”, currently showing at Abigail Ogilvy Gallery in Boston through October 1st, came to him as his ideas often do—in a dream. His previous series of oil paintings focused on texture in such a way that they could barely be considered entirely two-dimensional, given the way Jenkins slathered the paint onto the canvas. “I had a dream about them where I was walking through the paintings,” says Jenkins, “and that’s when I knew it was time for me to figure out how to make them three-dimensional.”

Jenkins’ interest in three-dimensional paintings centers around the idea of seeing the other side of the canvas, a concept that has fascinated Jenkins for years since he was an undergraduate at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. He returned to consult with professors who specialized in clay, but Jenkins didn’t want to use that medium. He wanted to sculpt with oil paint. “I figured since I’m a painter I should probably use oil paint,” he says.

The figures he created have skeletons of wire and molding paste with four to five dense layers—up to an inch-and-a-half thickness—of oil paint on top. These took Jenkins a year-and-a-half to complete and required a break from working on them before the show’s opening to give them time to dry properly. The pieces take up to four months to dry enough for travel and display, particularly in the leg areas, which Jenkins says are almost entirely made of paint, and in the sections using darker colors, which are more oil heavy.

Once dried, the figures are attached to spinning wood platforms and mounted on the wall to be presented as paintings traditionally are. The mechanism allows the viewer to experience the paintings from all vantage points, like the three-dimensional versions Jenkins imagined.

The figures are a manifestation of Jenkins’ own life, what he calls “the accumulation of things forgotten.” He points to images in ancient Egyptian art of figures called gift bearers, and he sees these figures within the same context. He is giving the gift of his life to the viewer.

“They’re like landscapes of my personal history,” says Jenkins. “My dad, women who have played a role in my life, mentors, artists who have helped me get to where I am right now. Those stories are now physical, and I won’t be able to forget them because they are documented.”

Jenkins still loves working in the two-dimensional, and his plan isn’t to move away from either that or three-dimensional, but rather to integrate them. One plan has him creating life-sized versions of clay and plaster. Another will find Jenkins creating portraits of his figures, which suits him fine.

“Everything that I do in 3D I’m going to end up painting in 2D,” Jenkins says. “I think they’re the best models now. They already look how I see the figures, so I don’t have to alter people, and also they don’t move, so they’re the best models. And they don’t complain about how bad I make them look.”

Lavaughan Jenkins–artist
Boston, Massachusetts
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Top image, Lavaughan Jenkins, all image courtesy of the artist

The post Oil Paintings Enter a New Dimension appeared first on Take Magazine.

A handful of passionate artists, inventors, and organizers in greater Boston are proving that the death of analog photography has been greatly exaggerated. The recently formed AgX Film Collective in Waltham, which is dedicated to photochemical filmmaking; CatLABS, a darkroom and vintage-camera resource in Boston that also publishes the art photography magazine PaperSafe; New55, a startup that has invented a new instant film for serious photographers; and artists such as Genesis Báez and Genevieve Carmel are part of the community that is keeping the art of “old school” photography and filmmaking alive and exciting.

While there’s plenty of collaboration between area colleges, including Harvard University and the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (MassArt), and artists who teach traditional filmmaking, students of these institutions can find it challenging to access analog equipment and know-how once they graduate. Many of them abandon their analog work altogether. AgX fills the void by providing not only a space for artists, but access to a community of filmmakers and photographers who share a passion for analog film.

“I would say the vast majority of the people involved [in the Boston filmmaking community] either teach at the schools, work at the schools, or attended the schools,” says one of the collective’s founding members, Stefan Grabowski, who is also curator of Balagan Films, a well-regarded film screening nonprofit. Located in a former textile mill on the banks of the Charles River in Waltham, AgX is on a mission to rescue expensive film equipment being disposed of by institutions and organizations around the country that no longer see the viability of film in a world that continually demands more, cost-efficient work produced digitally.

AgX hopes to become a resource where artists are able to complete all the stages of the analog workflow. “The model we’ve fallen into here is interesting,” says Grabowski. “We are a collective as well as an artist-run film lab, so we’re definitely interested in the community element of it.”

Film still from Brought into light by Stefan Grabowski and Mariya Nikiforova of AgX Film Collective, image courtesy of AgX Film Collective

“My interest in analog comes from a desire to push my own creative boundaries and to explore new approaches to nonfiction filmmaking,” says Genevieve Carmel, an artist and member of AgX. “I’m interested in making films that have to do with personal archives, and I find analog film an attractive format for pursuing this subject.” The handmade aspects of the analog filmmaking workflow, from loading film into a camera to splicing that film on a flatbed editing machine, allow Carmel “to feel present in the physical world”—a world that constantly pushes us to stare at our computer screens for work and other things in life.

Less than 20 miles from Waltham—once home to the Polaroid Corporation’s manufacturing plants before they were demolished in 2010—New55 has been breathing new life into a technology first introduced by Polaroid in 1961: Type 55 film. Well known to many artists, including Ansel Adams, who was a consultant to Polaroid, Type 55 was an instant, peel-apart, black-and-white film that also produced a high-quality, reusable negative. When Polaroid halted production of this large-format film in 2008, it dismayed Type 55 devotees—except for New55’s Bob Crowley. A seasoned inventor in Ashland, Massachusetts, Crowley began to research the physics and chemistry of how instant film worked.

Film still from Tarot Cycle by Brittany Gravely and Kenneth Linehan, image courtesy of AgX Film Collective

“I wasn’t interested in making a new Type 55 at all,” he says. “This is different, and the reason this is different is because it has to be. You couldn’t legally or morally make the old stuff the way it was made,” he says, referring to the toxic chemicals used to manufacture the older film.

New55 instant film is not a resurrection of Polaroid’s famous product, but rather a new nanotechnology-enabled product that is more technically sophisticated and environmentally friendly than its predecessor. After a smashing success with a Kickstarter campaign in 2015 that raised over $400,000, Crowley’s startup is in the early stages of commercialization. “We thought it was frustrating, challenging, exhilarating—and we’re just getting started,” he says, hopeful from the encouragement he’s received since launching the product.

Film still from Distilled Motion by Stefan Grabowski of AGgX Film Collective, image courtesy of AgX Film Collective

In Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood, interest in analog photography has been blossoming, especially with the addition of CatLABS, a darkroom resource where artists can also find a selection of large-format cameras, lenses, film holders, and other photographic gear. To further extend their mission to promote analog photography, Omer Hecht, owner of CatLABS, and western Massachusetts artist Trevor Powers founded the biannual print publication PaperSafe. It aims to create discourse within the analog photography community and highlight the work of emerging artists.

“[CatLABS] came from an understanding that there is a new crowd of users out there who were born post- ‘the digital revolution’ and are interested in film, but … they have a hard time finding a way in,” says Hecht, referring to the scarcity and expense of analog photography resources.

The “new crowd of users” Hecht describes, which tend to be aged 30 to 35, is the same crowd that’s fueling the work of Crowley and the staff at New55. “That group has had absolutely no trouble learning how to do this,” Crowley says. “Why? Because they didn’t use the old stuff very much. It was gone before they even got into their 20s.” He adds that among those who have had the most trouble learning to use New55 film are photographers who really loved the older Polaroid film. Still, he says, “We’re trying to make large-format photography accessible and easy.”

Both Hecht’s and Crowley’s words resonated in my conversation with Jamaica Plain artist Genesis Báez. A recent graduate of MassArt, Báez creates work in both black and white and color, using large- and medium-format film. “Sometimes it feels inaccessible. It’s hard and it’s definitely a commitment,” she says of the challenges of doing photography the “old-fashioned way.” Collectives like CatLABS and AgX aim to make things a bit easier for Báez and her fellow artists.

“I just went to CatLABS for the first time,” she tells me during our interview. “I knew about PaperSafe, which I recently submitted to, but I didn’t quite know what CatLABS did, and [I] spent some time talking to Omer. Whoa, this is such a gem!”

Báez says that the act of working with film is meditative. “It forced me to slow down in a way that felt very important in order to be present with my subject. I don’t have an infinite amount of [film] exposure, so I have to be very intentional, very deliberate. It almost became like making a painting.”

“Film has its own qualities,” says Grabowski of AgX, who, like Báez, is a MassArt graduate. “I was more drawn to film as a medium, because I’m sort of interested in all different kinds of art forms, and I saw it as a way to amalgamate all these different forms into one.”

“We aren’t against digital formats, nor are we interested in the film-versus-digital debate,” says Powers of PaperSafe. “We simply prefer the magic that happens when shooting with film.”

That magic keeps artists interested in continuing to make work in an analog way. The act of slowing down and relearning how to see, and the feeling of amazement when an image appears in the darkroom, are all part of the appeal of working with film. “There’s nothing like it,” says Crowley. “We’re not keeping it alive—it just isn’t going to die.”

This piece first appeared in our February/March 2016 print issue available here.

New55
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AgX Film Collective
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Top image, Vintage Polaroid camera at CatLABS in Boston | Image courtesy of CatLABS, photo by Tess Scheflan

The post Get It On Film appeared first on Take Magazine.

The two-dimensional never interested Boston-based artist Clive Moloney: 3-D offered more room for his imagination to roam. As a child growing up in the countryside in County Tipperary, Ireland, he created little towns and farms made from hazel tree branches and garden tools. As a graduate student at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, he created sculpture out of found objects such as laundry baskets, fans, plastic bags, with the intent of getting people to look at domestic objects from a different point of view.

In his exhibit at Contemporary Arts International in Acton, Massachusetts, Breathe, Pause, Breathe, Moloney goes a step further with a large-scale installation of multimedia projection and moving body-like parts that seem to breathe. It takes up more than 700 square feet. “The main aspect is to create a fantastic environment,” he says. “It may cause people to question how they perceive their own environment, particularly in terms of time. I regularly attempt to slow the viewer down, and this is often in stark contrast to our everyday lives.”

In the exhibit, extended through September 29, Moloney drew inspiration from The Quarry, the site of CAI, where the owners’ mission “is to promote the creation, understanding, and appreciation of contemporary art in the global context.” The 12-acre campus, the site of a former granite quarry, is surrounded by close to 100 acres of forest.

The exhibit took Moloney three years to finish. “Three years is a long time for a body of work,” he says. “There are a lot of structural engineering challenges, and you had to learn it all as you went along.”

A section of Breathe, Pause, Breathe / image courtesy of Clive Moloney

Moloney used latex because of its flexibility to create the appearance of skin on the parts that inflate and deflate as they move at alternating slow and fast speeds in a 10-minute loop. The pieces dip into vats of liquid latex, building up layers and twisting around, with tentacles forming and falling off. “The motor that drives it is like a life-support machine,” he says. “The enclosed system is like our bodies are. I started with the Buddhist idea of meditation and watching the breath.”

The 33-year-old left Ireland six years ago to study at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, where he completed his MFA in 3-D in 2013. He got his BFA in sculpture at Limerick School of Art and Design in 2007. He has exhibited at the Irish Museum of Contemporary Art, Limerick City Gallery of Art, Occupy Space in Ireland, 555 Gallery and Gallery Kayafas in Boston, and The Front Gallery in New Orleans.

Moloney has come a long way from Tipperary, a landlocked rural county that’s home to mountains, rivers, lakes and farmland. He says he always knew he wanted to be an artist; his father, an electrician, and his mother, a nanny, supported him in his dreams. “Within my fantastic environments, I investigate the true nature of chosen materials,” he writes in his artist statement. “My work exploits transformative materials that go through chemical reactions and changes of material states such as plaster, cement, sugar, and latex.”

A section of Breathe, Pause, Breathe / image courtesy of the artist

Moloney says the process is as important as the product. “The artwork goes through several steps and processes before completion. Mold making and casting is an example,” he says.

In the CAI exhibit, Moloney’s first major piece after earning his master’s, collaboration was also part of the process. He relied on the expertise CAI co-founder and Hungarian-born sculptor Viktor Lois, known for his machine creations. Lois did troubleshooting and helped weld pieces together. Moloney’s wife, an immunologist, lent biology textbooks and discussed her knowledge of the human body. Sue Murad, an artist and filmmaker who lives in nearby Jamaica Plain, made a video.

Next up Moloney plans to head to Taiwan to an artist village in Soulangh for two months to do a artist residency hosted by CAI co-founder Yin Peet, a Taiwan-born sculptor and philosopher.

Clive Moloney–artist
Boston, Massachusetts
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Top image from Breathe, Pause, Breathe, courtesy of Clive Moloney.
Video is by Sue Murad.

The post A Moving Experience appeared first on Take Magazine.

This article originally ran in our April/May 2016 print issue. 

Curators and working artists Lindsey Stapleton and Corey Oberlander—neither of whom is yet 30—have an ambitious remit to “exhibit the work that we feel deserves the spotlight,” particularly by artists just starting their careers.

Since opening in 2013, the duo have staged more than 30 shows at a breakneck pace, including the first Rhode Island edition of Bring Your Own Beamer, a worldwide series of pop-up exhibitions where groups of artists project their work on bare walls. In addition to attending annual art fairs like Art Basel Miami Beach and the SPRING/BREAK Art Show in New York City, they recently curated GROUND RULES at the University of Arkansas’s sUgAR Gallery.

The inspiration to start an unjuried, democratic space has its origins in Stapleton and Oberlander’s student days at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where they grew frustrated by how difficult it was to show “in a real space that wasn’t a café or a basement.”

That challenge stayed with them. After graduating in 2009 and 2010, respectively, the two lived on opposite coasts (Stapleton in San Francisco and Oberlander in the greater Boston area) until escalating rents forced them to look for a more affordable, art-friendly city. A Google search for “live/work/Providence” landed them squarely in The Plant, a sprawling mixed-use complex in the heart of Olneyville, a working-class neighborhood often called Providence’s “second downtown.”

Starting a gallery wasn’t their plan—at least not at first. “We knew we wanted it to be a studio space,” says Stapleton. “But we didn’t really figure out what we were going to do until we moved in and realized what Providence could handle.”

It took the duo a couple of months to realize that the city was hardly oversaturated with galleries showing emerging contemporary art. Researching Olneyville, they saw an opportunity to contribute to the growth of an up-and-coming arts community that includes feminist collective Dirt Palace (which celebrated its 15th anniversary in 2015) and neighboring art space Yellow Peril, which opened in 2011. “It was the perfect place for us to be,” explains Stapleton. “Not overly gentrified, still close to downtown Providence. And in the larger art-world scale, still close to Boston and New York City.”

The Transplantable, 2014 | Sarah Tortora | wood, wood composites, paint | 60×96×24 inches

GRIN’s inaugural exhibit was a group show titled Some Place Here that asked artists to riff on the prompt “home.”

“We try to do one group show to three-to-four solo shows,” says Stapleton. “We like solo shows. We like working with people who have the ability to put together a really solid body of work that can make a whole collection.”

Defining the GRIN aesthetic is a tricky business, because the work is so wide-ranging. Whether big or small, two-dimensional or three-, the guiding philosophy is playfulness and sly humor. (“Expect anti-jokes and anti-art,” reads the one-sheet for the recent group show, Besides.) Rough edges are welcome, self-importance is not.

Materials are frequently abused or subverted, as with Leah Piepgras’ day-glo clouds made of quartz, resin, or Styrofoam, or Charlie Smith’s punctured, cut, and drilled wooden assemblages that bend, snake, and contort.

Exploiting the tension between fantasy and domesticity is another frequent theme. Allison Baker’s mordantly funny video Party Girl crops tightly on two sharp-taloned hands as they carefully rip layer after layer of garish wrapping paper off a succession of gifts. The clichéd femininity of the trappings (long pink nails; hyper-saturated pink and polka-dotted paper; explosions of glitter) serve to underscore the Sisyphean punch at the end: the gifts are never revealed. The viewer remains stuck in a purgatory- loop of almost psychotic expectation.

Eddie Villanueva’s witty Guitar Ride reengineers a staple of American childhood, the kiddie ride, swapping in a classic symbol of American manhood, the electric guitar, in place of the pony. Drop 50 cents in the slot, and the guitar shimmies out the famous droning chord from “Tomorrow Never Knows” on the Beatles’ Revolver. Both curators work closely with the artists on the installation, which often becomes part of the art-making process itself. One of Smith’s early GRIN pieces, Strips, was actually created on site. “He came one day when we were de-installing the previous show,” explains Oberlander. “We were taking down a partition wall, and he asked if he could have it. ‘Sure, but it’s broken into pieces already.’ He was installing the next day, and I left for lunch. When I came back, the wall had been tipped on its side so it was a big diamond, and there’s a big 2 × 4 that’s been drilled into it. It turned into an additional piece—his reaction to the space—and it served perfectly for his show.”

That ability to “take risks and try weird ideas,” as well as collaborate outside the glare of the mainstream art world, gives the tight-knit Olneyville community its big advantage.

“As neighbors, we’ve developed what I call a ‘Spirit of Coopetition,’” notes Yellow Peril director Vanphouthon Souvannasane. “Besides aligning our opening nights, we share competitive intelligence on the international art market, specifically art fairs and other opportunities to extend the reach of our represented artists.”

Now that Stapleton and Oberlander are more enmeshed in the greater Providence arts community—including the Rhode Island School of Design, where the curators regularly sit in on portfolio reviews—they have come to appreciate the city’s long-term value for artists, particularly how it can help support more organic artistic growth. They’ve seen far too many students jump directly from graduation to a big city like New York or Boston without realizing that they may be leaving opportunity—and affordable incubator space—behind.

“When [such migration] comes to our attention, it’s like, Could you think about this?’” says Oberlander. “[Providence is] really close, and you can still access that New York scene or Boston—especially with the way that social media works.”

He and Stapleton say they have “a million different ideas” about how they can grow GRIN in the near future using the momentum they’ve built. Oberlander smiles: “It feels like we’re building a team.”

GRIN

Top image from the installation Gibberish: Sapient Fool’s Gold, 2015 | artist Jeannie Lynn Hulen | Image courtesy of GRIN Gallery

The post GRIN Reapers appeared first on Take Magazine.