This June 4–7, please join us in Fish Creek, Wisconsin as we debut new work by Peter Barrickman, Sara Caron, and Gabriel Hartley at the second Door County Contemporary Art Fair. This year, nearly thirty galleries, nonprofits, and artist-run spaces will gather at the Peninsula School of Art for the fair, panel discussions, and events that offer visibility and access to the arts scene in the Midwest and its connection to the global art world, situated among the beautiful natural resources of northeastern Wisconsin.
We are thrilled to share tree paintings by Milwaukee-based Peter Barrickman, functional Shizen (emergent flow) ceramics by Milwaukee-based Sara Caron, as well as a new series of pigment paintings by Tokyo-based British artist Gabriel Hartley.
Hartley's small paintings offer a serene entanglement of chromatic, formal, gestural, and textural elements. His background in ceramics, Japanese pigment painting, and Western abstraction are all present in these delicate compositions that appear to be of nature without describing it explicitly. His practice could be characterized by a dialectic between intentionality and contingency, wherein the dynamics of the creative process are laid bare. As his Tokyo gallerist Yukari Hagiwara put it, "The painting is a balancing act between finding and following leads and turning back and remembering very particular observed moments." Rooted deeply in the materiality of their making, much like Caron and Barrickman's works, Hartley's paintings function as artifacts of their own emergence, inviting us to be present through seeing the immediacy of the work itself.
Caron's functional ceramics can be viewed in the tradition of Bernard Leach and the Japanese Mingei (folk craft) movement: interacting with handmade items introduces mindfulness, beauty, and humanity into the mundane routines of everyday life. In this way Caron's porcelain and stoneware bowls embody simplicity and natural materials as true works of art. Physically they retain a record of their own emergence rather than serving as mere impositions of will. These pieces are in keeping with Caron's other social and ephemeral practices, in that they are economically accessible and will be available on a first come, first served basis.
In Barrickman's latest paintings the tree serves as a locus for the interplay of mark and color, facilitating the unfolding of the artist's signature improvisational process. These paintings operate on dual registers: they evoke an experiential engagement with nature while simultaneously charting the organic genesis of the image within the pictorial field. Ultimately, in each painting, the tree acts as an architectural container for chromatic resonance and painterly interaction. What accumulates across the series is less a record of trees than a record of decisions, the seductive and wily trace of a painter thinking through color and mark before us.
The artists took this occasion to reflect and discuss each other's work which we are happy to share here:
On Gabriel Hartley’s work
Peter Barrickman: I’m always thinking about objects and the way they acknowledge the scale of our bodies. We’re probably hardwired to do this I’m guessing as we essentially have the instincts of cave people and are survival-minded underneath everything else. For me, my hands, torso and head often feel like they are being addressed by the scale of smaller objects. In the most cave-person sense it has to do with an object making itself available to be held or hidden or protected or killed and maybe eaten?
These works that you’re showing at DCC are united in part by their scale. Can you share your thinking behind this? Also, how does this grouping of work fit within your practice relative to other projects you’ve done or are doing?
Gabriel Hartley: One of the first times I remember really being moved by an art object was when the Tate Modern opened in 2000 and for the first time I saw the Rothko Seagram murals. There was this real sense of being separated from my body when looking at them, I suppose you might call it a type of meditation. I also remember afterwards being totally absorbed by a very small Paul Klee work. Firstly having a feeling about really wanting to get back to making painting myself, but also, as you say, wanting to hold it and being very aware of my relationship to the object .
I kind of think since then I’ve been greedy and wanted to keep both those experiences of looking and reacting present in my paintings.
I often start off by painting on the floor at a large scale, around 3 m. Which is about the floor size of the part of my studio I paint in. The small ones often come from scraps off these large ones, or from details where I decide that the most interesting part of the painting is a small section. I either crop it and leave it there, or use that as a starting point for a small painting.
I thought for this selection that it would be nice to show the same format to give some kind of consistency between them. Perhaps allowing for a bit more leeway in differences in the ones selected.
I like to vary how things are displayed and how much separate parts of the practice show alongside each other. I have a feeling with these that they are perhaps more sculptural than in some other paintings I’ve recently made, probably as I have recently got back into make some sculptures after a long time off
Sara Caron: I’m excited to see these works in person! You make ceramics as well? I can’t decide if I can tell that from the paintings or if it’s just because I’ve seen some of your other work. But the paintings do look like something else, like photo emulsion, glaze, or ink from a print. How much do you think about what the object is when you move between media that way?
GH: Yeah I think the ceramics, along with the painted photographs, sculptures and collages do bleed their way into the way the paintings are made. I like to work with all the mediums at the same time so that natural slippages and coincidences occur. In the forms and in the processes. But there is of course something exciting about the specifics of each medium.
These paintings are all made with pigment and binder, and there are a few different processes going on. Sometimes the paint is quite sparsely applied where the cotton is stained from behind. In others paintings pieces of studio detritus; string, wood, old staples etc are placed and arranged on the cotton, covered in thick paint and then removed to leave the negative shapes.
On Sara Caron’s work
PB: In a conversation, Brit Krohmer said something similar in that clay has memory and wants to do certain things and therefore does not want to do other things. There is something profound about a material that has its own agenda.
I’m interested in the linearity or directionality of your glaze and how it holds onto the form in each case. The line (like lightning?) is a spontaneous shape upon a methodical structure. Like a soloist heard upon a rhythm section. The glaze cannot be seen all at once and suggests that we bring our activation either by moving around the object or maybe by spending some time living with it… drinking from it?
Is there a possible connection in your and Gabriel’s work in that the nature of the mark emanates from the object or image? Your bowl is a tool for pouring its own glaze while the stains, puddles and drips of Gabriel’s paintings are the mark-making vocabulary of the natural world that is being referenced in that work.
SC: Yes! The bowl is a tool for pouring its own glaze! And the clay moves in the way clay will and the body throwing that clay influences it too. Practically, clay and glaze are going through tremendous transformation, becoming structurally unrecognizable to their original forms, which are infinitely recyclable and malleable in a way they never can be after firing. When I think about painting I think of it as always retaining that infinite workability, maybe a painter doesn’t? But, I definitely definitely see that connection.
In the pots, the lines of the glaze are spontaneous as much as the materials allow, as much as the hand allows, as the shape of the vessel allows in a loopy way I find compelling. The pieces are definitely designed to be used, with a mind towards not just the experience of seeing them on the table or the shelf but also the tactile experience of carrying them to table and passing them and washing them, and eventually maybe breaking them.
GH: There’s a real poetry to white on white , and the small subtle variations that happen . It’s really hard to tell from a photograph but that’s what feels like is happening here. Are they porcelain with white slip , and then some with a clear glaze and some without? There also is a variation in the clay body colour that I’m really intrigued by.
SC: That’s what I think is happening here, too! There are several different clay bodies I used for these bowls — two different porcelains, a nearly white stoneware, and a “proprietary blend” of white clay reclaim from my studio. Recycled clay factors heavily in my functional ceramic work. I appreciate the unpredictability of the blends, the connection to my studio, and the labor that goes into making it (throwing and glazing happen much faster and more spontaneously for me). There’s no slip but a white glaze that reminds me of icing on a cookie. When I glaze I do it pretty sloppy, I let the glaze pour out of the bowl at random and splash some on the outside quickly too. I like throwing because I think it’s more fun to collaborate with the material that way. I think it lets clay do its own thing, maybe more poetically?
On Peter Barrickman’s work
GH: Somehow I’m thinking about how Constable didn’t really want to paint landscapes but wanted to paint Clouds and trees. Cloud and tree portraits. I’m afraid I don’t have a properly formulated question here. But something on the lines of whether the trees are a way into painting a kind of portrait. Or perhaps just a way into making a painting, and the good stuff is what follows.
PB: Yes, I do think of them as being portraits. It’s interesting to consider what quality brings about the word portrait. It crops up through the repetition here. They each are entrenched in a specificity that plays upon difference, which makes them each inflexibly themselves. And like an actor who is only seen in a scenario that is written for them, each are accompanied by their own atmosphere or canopy. If these are characters of an invented ensemble they might aspire to the obstinacy and variation of a Kaurismaki cast.
Thinking about Constable and giving oneself permission OR finding a way in. I need a different energy to start a painting than is required to finish it and often an interesting transformation occurs between beginning and end. At the beginning, I can be irrationally optimistic about what I have planned. This delusion gives way and I eventually see that the painting I’m making will never meet up with my plan. This is a kind of break or crisis which stops the painting. Once I get over this and see the painting for what it is, I can proceed by slowly following what possibilities it reveals, but only by staring at it a lot.
Not all paintings have this drama, but the painting I finish is never the one I thought I was starting.
SC: These really do give the impression of lying underneath a tree through the seasons; I’d like to spend a long time in each of these places. It will be nice to see them with my white ceramic bowls;I thought a lot about your paintings while making them. What appeals to me about some of my favorite paintings of yours are the way textures and light are rendered, but the light in a mechanical way, like the way a photo or a film records light, does that make any sense? The processes feel really different, the trees end up so smooth and architectural but the shapes are sometimes shockingly similar to the glaze drips and splashes on my bowls.
PB: I think trees are always telling us about time, like living clocks.
Definitely, there are some uncanny echoes between your glazing and the branches.
Your point about mechanized light is great. There’s no question that looking at painters was transformative for me as a young artist. But at a certain point using color printers and especially shooting different film stocks each with a distinct grain and saturation made me even more aware of keying and color as an intentional, additive process. The lens and chemicals of photography produced an aesthetic which became a lesson in working within limitations. If Agfa, Ilford and Fuji were the names of painters they would have been as strict as the pointillists.
In short, we are thrilled to share these three artists’ distinct, complementary, and gorgeous bodies of work with you this week.
We are also pleased to note that Scott Reeder and Tyson Reeder, two artists with long ties to The Green Gallery, will be presenting new work at the fair through CANADA NYC, and, Sculpture Milwaukee, will present work by Pao Her.