If I ever get to write a review for an opening of my own work, I might be more proud than I am to write this review, but not by much. Back when I was considering starting this blog I went looking for people who were doing what I was planning on doing, namely reviewing art openings as an artist in the New York City area. My first search was admittedly very shallow and I didn't find much. But I did find this blog called Thinking About Art by this guy named J.T. Kirkland. I found a pleasant little online community of reasonably thoughtful reasonably smart people had grown around this writer and artist, so I started writing to him and commenting on his blog. Eventually he was in New York and we went through Chelsea together.
Since then, of course, I've found that there are about a million blogs doing approximately what I'm doing, all with slight differences, of course. But J.T. is still special to me, because his art is like nothing I've ever seen; and he introduced me to Ed Winkleman, and without that I wouldn't know anyone.
Of course what you say to any artist you know is "Let me know when you're having a show!" Only J.T. is down in Virginia and, really, when am I ever going to get down there? I'd certainly like to think, if he had a major show as far north as Washington, D.C. or Baltimore, that I'd make an effort to get down there. But who am I kidding? I've lived almost my entire life on a line between Philadelphia and New York City. I'm not going anywhere.
So naturally when J.T. told me about his GREAT IDEA -- to hold a mini-art fair of his own work in his hotel room in New York, where he's holed up for his day job -- I knew I had to be there. I really wanted to be there all three nights, actually, but my life keeps intruding, so I could only go Wednesday.
I arrived to find that J.T. had managed to convert his small hotel room into a mini-gallery. His work -- mostly wood, with one framed drawing -- hung on the walls, and the bed was covered with his drawings and prints. The room's table became the gallery's front desk, along with postcards, verbiage, price lists, a laptop and a sign-in book. Altogether this was clearly the work of some kind of insane details freak -- just the kind of guy you might expect to spend his spare time drilling hundreds of tiny holes into planks of wood.
J.T. has noted that most people don't care much about wood. Even other sculptors -- he mentioned Donald Judd -- who use wood don't care about the wood per se. They only care that it's plywood or whatever. And of course any artist who paints on a panel uses wood -- but, J.T. asks, are they really improving on it?
Turning the question around, TJ on J.T.'s blog said that he felt J.T. wasn't improving on the wood -- that in fact the holes distracted viewers from the beauty of the wood itself. Having seen the work in person, I now see that the exact opposite is true. By drilling holes according to his own plan, J.T. calls attention to the wood in a way impossible using just wood alone. His intentional acts -- the holes -- serve to highlight the areas in which his intention has not acted -- the wood grain. In a sense -- although I don't mean this literally, even though it is literal in some of his pieces -- J.T. has put a frame around the wood grain, allowing us to appreciate it as its own sort of random art. Without the frame, it's just wood. It's flooring or furniture or a handrail. With the frame, it's something to look at and appreciate.
One thing that's impossible to appreciate online is the range of sizes in J.T.'s work. Sure, he prints the size next to each JPEG. But it's not the same. Some pieces reminded me of toy blocks while others were quite large. None of them ended up being the size I expected them to be. And of course the depth of the wood grain -- he uses no stain, no varnish, nothing but sanding (he alluded to some secret process he's worked out to enhance the grain) -- the depth of the wood grain can't be reproduced.
His drawings are oddly different and yet similar to his wood work. They all share a common sense of some obsessive compulsive working out his energy at the end of the day. His drawings are mostly circles, each carefully -- not to say laboriously -- inked in the style of a turn of the (last) century draftsman. J.T. has taken to using scrapbook paper, which is archival and comes in a wild array of patterns and colors, as the background for his intense scribing. The clash of arts-n-crafts and art makes beautiful music, even when J.T.'s only addition is a dark line slashing arrow straight across the graded stripes of the paper.
At the show J.T. talked with me and Stephanie Lee Jackson, who had beat me there, and a few other people who dropped by, including Cate Nolan and Jim Leonard, who together form a married pair. (The preceding sentence was brought to you by People for Non-preferential Gender References.) Jim, incidentally, is clearly, if you read his Website, entirely insane.
Because I was one of the lucky few to visit, J.T. gave me a free print. I chose this one here. Not for any good reason beyond I liked it best out of the ones he had available. J.T. told me it was his favorite. I wonder if he says that to everyone who gets a print.
I'd suggest at this point that everyone go and see his show, but it's gone now. So instead I'd suggest you read his blog, and keep an eye out for his next show. And even if it's in Virginia, you make the trip.
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