“The Two States of W.W.” Exhibition

TSA

poster for “The Two States of W.W.” Exhibition

This event has ended.

There are several scenes where Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is featured prominently in the cable television series Breaking Bad. Walter White, the show’s antihero, recites “Song of Myself.” His assistant gives White the book and envisions him as the scientist in “When I Heard The Learn’d Astronomer.” The program famously takes a tragic turn when Hank, Walter White’s brother-in-law and also a cop, finds White’s copy of Leaves of Grass with an inscription from the assistant that implicates him as the meth kingpin Heisenberg and “my other favorite W.W.”

Thus revealed that W.W. is two people, two personas, two time-periods, two regions, and two states of mind. The character of Walter White is a timid high school teacher, but also a ruthless gangster. Walt Whitman’s dualistic narrations incorporate multiple selves and multiple bodies in Leaves of Grass, particularly in “I Sing The Body Electric.” Hank’s revelation serves as inspiration for this exhibition of artists that have lived in both New York and New Mexico. At the heart of this exhibition are the following questions: How does the artist express the intangibilities of life? How does the orientation of one’s body in space change one’s understanding of it? How does the artist’s formative environs affect their practice?

As a center of commerce since America’s beginning, New York City has been, by extension, its art capital. Beyond New York, there are other artist colonies and art-making centers*, but none as venerated as Santa Fe and the surrounding northern New Mexico area. For the purpose of this exhibition, the two cities (and respective states) represent two polemics: The culture of the East versus the West, the urban versus the pastoral, verticality versus horizontality.

To exist in the two states is to know the differences, but also to experience the similarities: Temporality operates in a similar manner; the desert of New Mexico invokes an ancient landscape where the wind and sand eliminate the footprints of previous inhabitants. Time is always present in New York as those who leave the city come back to always find it changed. Whole buildings are erased and in their place are new structures rendering the place alien to those who revisit.

The precedent for artists living in both states goes back to the late nineteenth century when train service first arrived in New Mexico. Mabel Dodge Luhan, who helped mount the first Armory Show in New York, started an art colony in Taos, New Mexico. John French Sloan, Marsden Hartley, and D.H. Lawrence would arrive from New York to join her. As did Georgia O’Keeffe, whose abstracted landscapes would be allowed to expand in scale compared to her New York work. She wrote in a 1924 exhibition catalog the paintings had been kept “small because space in New York necessitates that.”

The contrast from the noise, frenetic energy, and lack of space of New York would influence Agnes Martin, Richard Tuttle, John McCracken, Lynda Benglis, Harmony Hammond, and Steina and Woody Vasulka to move to (or split time in) New Mexico to experience different space, color, temperature, and light. The subject matter of Susan Rothenberg’s paintings would be directly affected after her move to Bruce Nauman’s Galisteo ranch in 1990. In an interview with Ann Temkin, Rothenberg says that moving to New Mexico allowed a “different kind of perspective” to come into her work.

The artists selected for this exhibition will present work that reveals aspects of this phenomenon as some individual works may readily reveal the influence by New Mexico/New York, while for others it may be more of a subconscious affect woven into the artist’s decision making process.

Media

Schedule

from January 09, 2015 to February 15, 2015

Opening Reception on 2015-01-09 from 18:00 to 21:00

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