Weekend Recap 1.10.10

I spent most of the weekend in a bookbinding workshop at the San Francisco Center for the Book, where I happened to see the next exhibit being installed. Restless Dust: A ghost walk with Darwin features work by artist-in-residence Gail Wight. The exhibit will run through April 17, with an opening reception on January 15, 6-8pm. Here's a little preview:

Dale Eastman

I met Dale Eastman at the opening of her show at Zonal, where I was intrigued by her studies of language and the visual and conceptual space between words. Although I was quite intimidated by her own editorial background, we met again for this story.

Born in San Mateo, Dale Eastman was the second of six children. Her father had been a cowboy who would buy herds of sheep and eventually became a salesman, so the family moved several times:

"It was a lot of energy - emotional energy - and a lot of movement. It's astonishing how much time that can take up. I think I was kind of the visual guardian. We all kind of took care of each other because we moved around a lot, so we [the kids] became a little tribe"

With all the activity and interaction, Eastman didn't reserve herself for quiet things like reading or journal writing, but she did take up sewing and even considered becoming a fashion designer:

"Sewing was, I think, the first thing that helped me focus and I think really that was why I was drawn to it as strongly as I was. And my mom sewed most of my clothes and I really loved the idea of that, that she could teach me something"

But after studying History in college, Eastman began a career in journalism. Becoming an investigative journalist, Eastman's work involved in-depth, personal studies of subjects like Jesse Jackson:

"I think what I was trying to do with other people was what I couldn't do yet with myself. And that was ask every single question, probe every possible nuance of every sentence"

Eventually, Eastman's career brought her back to San Francisco to be editor-in-chief of San Francisco Magazine. In 2000, she left the magazine and began writing fiction, but after a childhood and career of focusing externally, Eastman struggled to capture her own feelings:

"There was so much even then, in the fiction, that I couldn't get out because the words weren't enough [...] Writing is a very spacial thing for me and I could sense these literal depths and I could feel myself at times reaching down and pulling things up. After years and years of feeling this and not even knowing what I was feeling, I thought, again, 'What if I don't reach down and pull that stuff up? What if I do something that allows me to stay down there and record that level?'"

To capture that emotional content that was beyond words, Eastman began experimenting outside of writing, with photography and sound installations:

"Just to play with a different side of my brain, I started doing little projects. They're mostly conceptual, but not with thread at all. I was trying to recreate sound and movement that I saw out on the street"

Eventually, she gravitated back to her passion for sewing, connecting fabric squares with abstract thread patterning that contemplated negative space and oriented lines in other ways than the left to right horizontal stripes of text:

"I was kind of just examining the energy that moves between moments that we identify"

With the act of writing revolutionized by computers and word processing, Eastman felt disconnected from the writing process and craved more physical engagement. She thought about sewing the dictionary, to both connect to the process of "making words" and also to reflect on literally feeling at a loss for words:

"It was this physical, spacial awareness [...] part of what I felt was I was just getting so far away from literally making a story"

Meanwhile, Eastman was frustrated with the impassive direction of work by contemporary conceptual artists, such as Damien Hirst, and the emotional deceit within the revelation of false memoirs, like that of JT Leroy. Seeking to embrace emotional authenticity, she took a 1500-word short story she had written and sewed it a word at a time on individual squares and then wound the story in a large glass bottle:

"[To make] people to feel as close as possible what I felt[,] I made a tangled mess and created a story where someone literally has to go through the same process I went through and felt"

Having bridged her writing with visual expression, Eastman was ready to move beyond sewing words:

"I think this is why I love writing, but I think this is why I love art even more: With words, we think because we assign a word to something, we understand it. But with this, I wanted to get to those feelings where: 'I can't describe it, but here's how it feels'"

Still working with thread on fabric squares, every morning Eastman began recording her emotional memories from the prior day. She then strung the squares together and hung the strips from wood, creating a linear pattern that reflected words on a page as much as days on a calendar. What began as a square per day, became strips of squares per day, but some squares are missing:

"[It's] expanding consciousness, so now I'm to the point where I can pretty much remember everything that happens [...] When I couldn't remember a feeling from the day before, I left a space. So then when it's up on the wall and the string continues, what you see is the framework that holds us up"

In this context, Eastman's threads create a skeleton and the cloth squares, each with their cardiogram-like emotional recording, become the bits of flesh hanging from the bones. But in contrast to a written autobiography, this emotional self-portrait is not recognizable:

"For me they're extraordinarily supercharged because of what I went through. So, again, it's something that's simple on the surface but behind it there's an extraordinary amount of generally emotional information"

By recording and displaying without writing, Eastman plays with the very notion of verbal communication. Compared to her earlier struggle to find words, Eastman now turns the expository nature of writing on its ear:

"I think writers [or] artists of almost any ilk have secrets and there's a duality to a secret: a secret isn't a secret if other people know about it, but if other people don't know about it, [then] they don't know you"

Going further with the notions of secrets, Eastman's next project involves sewing boxes, but not always revealing the contents. Thus, after years of writing, her visual creations are now taking her further from words and deeper into feeling:

"For me, art is a way into the psyche of first and foremost myself; but then, because I don't think I'm that much different from anybody else, hopefully the culture around me"

See Dale Eastman's "Making Something Out of Nothing" show at Zonal Home through February.

Joshua Hagler

Since starting the Arteaser Project, I have enjoyed learning from the artists I interview and being introduced to new artists, techniques and ideas. In many ways my conversation with Joshua Hagler epitomized this experience, as I frantically wrote down his reference points for follow-up investigation.

Born on an Air Force base in Idaho, Josh Hagler was raised in a conservative environment. At age nine, his family moved to rural Litchfield, Illinois, where Hagler escaped into the supernatural world of comics:

"I drew comic books religiously as a kid. I loved reading comics, so I was always making these comic books. I was like twelve years old and they were rip-offs of the X-men and so on, superheroes with powers. That's how I fantasized as a kid, just creating these worlds and characters"

At sixteen, the family moved a second time to Arizona and although he dreamt of going to Chicago's Art Institute, he opted for a more practical degree in illustration at the University of Arizona. As part of the first generation in his extended family to go to college, support was not taken for granted and Hagler himself worked for the school newspaper as art director and drawing comics, as well as illustrating children's books:

"My parents just made it apparent to me early on that that was how it was going to be: so its either sink or swim, which I think was a very valuable lesson"

While his love of comics drew Hagler to illustration, he enjoyed the painting classes that he took in college, especially the technical instruction of David Christiana. Discovering the works of Francis Bacon, Robert Rauschenberg, Willem de Kooning and Lucien Freud broadened Hagler's artistic horizons:

"I pretty much wasn't aware of anything culturally, except for comic books, until about the time I was about to graduate from school, from art school [...] It all started from that genre - [the] sci-fi/fantasy world - until I became interested in the art world and contemporary art and modern art"

Meanwhile, his horizons were broadening in other ways:

"[I was] always involved the church, both in Illinois and in Arizona. It was in Arizona that I got involved in the campus Christian organizations and stuff like that for quite a while, until [because of] everything from taking classes in philosophy and comparative religion and various things [...] I ended up just getting away from all of it."

After graduating, Hagler moved to San Francisco, using the money from selling his car to get settled. He credits the friends and contacts he's made in San Francisco as pushing his creative work to the next level:

"I kind of see my BFA, my undergrad, as what just got it started, but I think my real education just had to do with moving to San Francisco. That was really more of an education I think, in art terms"

He began working as an illustrator and by 2004 he was doing illustration full time. Hagler also began to familiarize himself with galleries and was able to phase out his illustration business as he sold more paintings. By spring of 2007, he held his first major solo exhibit, called "Bring Us Rapture":

"That was the first body of work that I had prepared that specifically dealt with Christianity, that dealt with - really, what I now kind of realize I was concerned with - which was groupthink. I'm interested in the strange creature that is the human being that as an individual behaves one way and then as a social creature behaves another. So I think I've just been creating a mythology based on that"

Since recieving a grant in 2008, Hagler has been able to focus full time on creating the series for his upcoming show, titled "72 Virgins to Die For," in which he goes beyond Christianity to further explore human social behavior in the context of religion:

"It deals with Islam and Mormonism and Judaism and Christianity, Catholicism as well [...] When you take a step back, they're all really similar. They're ideas are really similar, what they require of people is really similar, in certain places and certain times"

One of these common requirements that Hagler reflects on is purity and its relationship to power, control, and violence:

"The way that I'm defining purity is not specifically in reference to sexuality, but also spiritually, intellectually. To me, the main feature of purity is that you buy into idealism of some kind or another - that's the price of admission. So if you're not willing to buy into that wholeheartedly then you can't be pure, and unless you're willing to buy into that wholeheartedly and take a vow of purity of some kind, you're also not as easily manipulated."

To suggest that the applicability of his message is broadly human, Hagler often obscures and distorts the faces of his human subjects or covers them with moths, in reference to a Sufic allegorical story about understanding the nature of God only through destructive denial of self:

"The vortex and the moth are two features that I use over and over in this body of work [...] I guess I look at it as alluding to timelessness [...] They're not specific people - they're ideas"

Human subjects are not the only embodiments of purity in Hagler's work: he also uses animals that are treated inhumanely for the sake of indulgent delicacies, such as Ortolans, Baluts, foie gras, and veal. Some of these delicacies have religious overtones, but some seem to speak more broadly about violence masked by beauty and purity:

"You follow an obsession far enough and you start to realize that maybe its not as simple as you first thought [...] It's this feature about human behavior that causes what I think of as violence, whether that's literal violence or violence of the mind [...] It doesn't have to do with a specific religion. A religion cannot be inherently good or evil - it's just a vehicle"

While he recognizes that the destructive facets of human nature that intrigue him transcend religion, it remains his point of reference:

"I keep trying to dig further and further. I think religion lends specificity to sort of ground some of this stuff [...] so ultimately I think that there will always be that aspect of religion there because that is my experience and I think I experienced the most amount of [...] disillusionment."

As Hagler continues to explore deeper and darker elements of humanity, he considers his study inconclusive and remains sensitive to the subtleties of humanity's connection to religion:

"I want to go further into what happens when you take those things away that people believe in. And maybe we do need those things [...] maybe in the end that's what I end up finding [...] I don't really want to make polemic work that is picking on a particular religion, that's saying 'you're the cause of all our problems' "

Laden with reference, Hagler's visually compelling works have a distinct style that often suggest the supernatural in order to reflect on the utterly human:

"It's starting to be something complete unto itself [...] They are myths themselves and they just are now borrowing from religions that people still believe in in a literal way."

Josh Hagler's "72 Virgins to Die For" will be on display at the Frey Norris Gallery from February 5 to March 1.

Mirang Wonne

I first met Mirang Wonne during the Hunters Point Open Studios in October, where I was intrigued by large, mysterious-looking paintings of trees and branches. I returned to her studio months later to learn the story behind her work.

While living in Paris for art school, Mirang Wonne met another Korean native who recognized the artist's name. As it turned out, this woman's family had purchased the house that Wonne grew up in and Wonne's parents hadn't thought to check the attic for their daughter's doodles:

"Since my parents were selling the house, they painted everything, but they didn't know that I did graphics in the attics! [...] So she said, 'You know we bought your house and we found your graphics in the attic [...] there's all these small drawings and there's always a name: Mirang Wonne'"

Indeed, the attic walls weren't the only surfaces to Wonne took to drawing on. As the youngest of six, Wonne generally had free reign and her mother, who was a fashion designer, never chastised her for doodling around the house:

"We have a system where every season we change the wallpaper [...] so if I [drew on] this or that, we were changing it very often. And then my parents are very liberal people, so they allowed me to do anything"

Wonne's residential graffiti wasn't the only art showing in the household. Her father, who worked in education, collected illustrated scrolls, which he changed around the house ever season and would occasionally invite the artists over. Once in school, Wonne would draw in her school notebooks from the back, while taking notes from the front. But getting into a university art program was no joke:

"When I went to school in Korea [...] we had very strict education, like classic eduction to get into that school [...] We prepared 3-6 years, so for whoever gets into the art school in university, they sort of mastered how to draw and how to sketch and how to paint"

After college, Wonne received a scholarship to do graduate studies at Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. The early seventies in Paris were punctuated by student revolutions and she was involved in a number of group shows and her first solo show: an installation in four outdoor pavilions. For the installation, which integrated with nature through paper sculptures that moved in the wind, Wonne had to adapt some of her ideas to the local environment:

"I wanted to have huge rocks covered with paper, colored paper, but [small rocks were] all I could find at that time because Paris really doesn't have huge rocks or mountains!"

Wonne went on to complete a doctorate in art theory at the Sorbonne, but when she returned to Korea, she quickly realized that she didn't enjoy teaching. Around the same time she married another Korean who worked in the US, so she moved to the States. After working as an art director in New York for several years, Wonne moved to the Bay Area, where she began gravitating back towards creating art:

"I started all over again. I mean I always wanted to do painting, but since I had young kids so I thought I couldn't [...] but really one day I couldn't bear myself"

To brush up on her painting (pardon the pun), Wonne had tried taking an art class in the States, but compred to the four hour practical entrance exam required for university admittance in Korea, the American art education system was far less structured:

"[In] my country, Korea, we don't have to explain too much what I'm doing. The professors - they look at it and they know right away what I'm doing"

Meanwhile, despite the recession of the early 1990s, Wonne signed up for commercial studio space and began working as a career artist. She now views her studio as her sanctuary:

"I know one thing: without this space, I would go crazy [...] I would be miserable [...] this is like my sanctuary [...] I'm so happy that I have some space to work. And sometimes the work comes out right, sometimes it doesn't , but even then I feel so fortunate"

In the sanctuary of her studio, Wonne channels her emotions and experiences into her work. A couple years ago, some medical concerns cast a shadow on Wonne's life, which inspired a new series of work:

"After that period I came in [to the studio] and it was so gloomy. So just after that was a [bunch] of colors [...] I did all kind of color work because I needed some colors"

Whether colorful flowers, wispy branches, or peaceful boulders, Wonne frequently uses natural imagry in her work, but she is quick to point out that her work is not about nature, per se:

"It's not nature is my subject matter - life is my subject matter [...] I kind of borrow the form of nature to express something that I want to express"

For Wonne the relationship between life and nature may be less distinct, an attitudes she attributes to her Asian heritage:

"Being Asian [...] we have kind of a peculiar philosophy [...] we grew up like 'I am part of nature'. It's not learned from a textbook [...] the common thinking is 'we are part of nature, we are part of the universe' it's not anything [from] a particular philosophy we studied"

She recently returned to Asia in 2008 for her first show in Korea in many decades, where her work was well received. Having come a long way from doodling on attic walls, Wonne's instinct to convey her ideas visually remains:

"Artwork is like a diary for me. It sounds kind of casual, but it really means a lot to me. I try to be as honest as possible"

See some of Mirang Wonne's work on display in the One California Street building as well as the USF School of Law Rotunda Gallery. This spring she will have work up at the Ira Wolk Gallery in St. Helena from February 14 to March 14 and at the Triton Museum from March 7 to May 17.