You can do any number of things to make some material a work of art. You can burn it, erase it, fill it, hang it, stretch it, cut it, tape it, paint it, lick it, glaze it, draw it, break it, find it, publish it, hide it, make a series…
In the context of what you make, how and when do you know which method to use?
Somebody might see a torn-up, abstract painting and call it a dead, derivative horse that artists should stop beating. And then there’s Bryce Hample’s show at Winning, where all the chairs had been removed from the big room and it was an honest-to-goodness gallery. If you love Anselm Keifer, and tolerated Stanley Donwood after the initial honeymoon period wore off, then you’ll want to stick around to see how Bryce turns out.
We all felt something that night. We were a crowd of Tiny Tims from the Dickens novel, looking up at the Hample originals, waiting for Christmas to come. We got that jolty joy from seeing something new, even though we’ve seen these elements used before.
He also used a lot of leftover latex house paint the color of aging bananas and unhealthy skin and robot rust vomit, yellowy beige and pinky tan and that sort of thing, with gray and white and black acrylic.
Holes punch-cut into large, square, smoky, war-torn wood surfaces, plus everyone’s favorite piece, that black and white one on the far left. You could call them abstract but they also have a worldly weight to them, like toxic, dusty clouds hanging around the old sagging walls of an industrial factory district; oily robot breath in the winter; the visual space between the ears of a man who doesn’t prefer words. The music was melodic static-drone-noise-dream-cloud music, do you understand? It was an experience.
Also, thank you Bryce for not posting an artist statement. It made us all better people that night.
Let me take this time now to make fun of artist statements by making one up right now using elements common to artist statements that make them so wince-inducing in the first place:
“I’m fascinated by the play of thought against reality. What we want versus what we get. It’s intriguing how we think of a color, but it may not be available in the tube, so thus begins the battle to find the right color, which is a metaphor for finding the right words, or finding the right partner, finding the right place to put everything in this crazy world. So I don’t use colors from the tube cause it’s like reverting to a stereotype instead of getting to know somebody. So if you see my painting, the black is actually a mixture of cobalt blue, vermilion red, pthalo green, and Payne’s gray. The white is, well, I don’t use white. I just let the natural whiteness of the canvas shine through like the holy spirit.”
My point is Bryce spared us from that type of atmosphere.
We interrupt this program to tell you the following paragraph will be written in a mixture of broken Englishes:
Hiram arrive looking like Abe Lincoln grandma with beard like Abe in blue carpet bag poncho. I see other man across a street last hour and he weirded out I like Bryce art show, and he say me to explain what good about it, and I say I will just write for Noodle and then he can see what it all about.
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I don’t know what it all about, but it a physical sensation too, and if you cannot like, maybe you need to stop smoking so your blood vessel unrestricted and you feel sensitive to life again and can truly understand power of Hample original. But one thing, it not good to show canvas texture all over under so thin paint in one painting. Make nice thick prime first time.
There were 35 people at 7:40 p.m.
“This is nice,” Emma said decidedly, holding hot tea. “I guess it means I don’t have to leave.”
Eva Avenue is the Editor-in-Chief of The Nightly Noodle Monthly.
