GRIN HAS CLOSED

After five years and fifty shows, we have decided to close our location in Providence, Rhode Island. This city has served as an amazing launching pad, and the local support we've received here over the years has been staggering. Despite that, we aren’t able to sustain the brick and mortar space in its current capacity, and think it’s unfair to our artists and ourselves to push something that’s unable to move forward.  

Like many other gallerists and curators around the world, we've realized that the traditional gallery model is not able to meet our ambition. We will be moving towards a more nomadic program; producing purposeful shows when and where we are able, and focusing on community and collaboration with like-minded individuals everywhere. We're sad about the end of this era, but unrelentingly excited about the future. This was a difficult decision for us to make, but ultimately, and undoubtedly, is in the very best interest of the art and artists we want to support.

Please join us on Saturday, February 3rd from 6-9pm to celebrate GRIN and reminisce over everything it’s accomplished. We'll have a few catalogues and postcards of all our shows and events, some libations and plenty of stories and fond memories to share. 

If you can't make it, keep in touch!


♡ Corey & Lindsey ♡

INTERVIEW // AMY BEECHER IN CONVERSATION WITH ALAN LONGINO

A CONVERSATION BETWEEN AMY BEECHER AND ALAN LONGINO ON THE OCCASION OF BEAUTIFUL, BEAUTIFUL, BEAUTIFUL ROSE!

Alan Longino - So it's probably the most beautiful day in New York yet, cool and warm not so hot, and the other day I remembered I wrote a text about flowers and the caring of them for an artist's catalogue last summer. Thinking then to the title of your show, considering roses and the different stories you weave together without definitive endings or beginnings, I was wondering what you were considering in the title of your show and the consideration of flowers with the carpet and video works. 

Amy Beecher-  It's funny that you bring up the act of caring for flowers, their actual earthly existence...I have around 55 dozen red roses sitting on top of carpet in my studio as I type. I'm waiting for them to shrivel up because I like the sound of the crunch under my feet and am going to weave that texture into the installation somehow...we'll see... during install.

It's not so much the physicality of the rose that I'm interested in...it's the paradox between its earthliness and its iconicity. I’m more interested in the idea of red roses. I like the tension between the physical reality of the rose- that it came from the dirt, that its life is already over the minute we're admiring it in a bouquet...and its overdetermined semiotic existence. You know if you read reviews of roses on Amazon all of the reviews are ridden with this anxiety about the durability of the rose. “How long will it last though???” I think there's something so romantic and absurd about that.

The meaning of the rose is so bloated through repetition in Western culture yet it has not lost its allure. So I knew I wanted to do a show that used the commodification of the rose, the rose in popular culture, as raw material (Amazon reviews as raw material for sound pieces, dialogue from the rose ceremonies on The Bachelor as building blocks for a poem) and to create images and passages that felt artificial, monotonous, repetitive, but still sensuous. The carpet is another formal passage in the installation. It's this artificial fuchsia nylon that feels right against the sound of the crunch of the roses in Catching Lead...and also linguistically related to the cheesiness of the red rose...it feels like a teenager's bedroom...I hope it feels kind of wrong but indulgently right in the gallery....

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Stories without clear beginnings and ends...I guess that is a thread that runs throughout my work. And not just my writing. I've made prints that were too big to see all at once (uncut, 2012)...images that are so repetitive and pattern-like that that feel like wallpaper but are unique (Iceberg..) And yes that character Susannah in tbh is a rambler and this poem XO could really go on indefinitely... I guess there's something kind of subversive in formlessness to me...quietly aggressive about rambling on... like resisting the impulse to "sum it up," "push up against a frame," follow an arc, or worship the aura of a singular object.

AL - Well, I think just rambling on and talking without beginning or end is not only necessary these days, but obligated these days. It demonstrates some type of delay in understanding or learning or rationalizing, and though it may not be immediately fruitful, rambling--for the person rambling and the person listening--could be another allure that you mention: that is, concise, definitive meaning and language has equally repeated and circled in on itself that even the most clear-cut presentations are essentially rambling. [In your exhibition tbh you created Susannah]  a fictional character, seemingly real enough, who is equally an alluring figure. The rose, the rambling, the character, it's all very close to painting also being "bloated through repetition in Western culture yet has not lost its allure."

Amy Beecher - Ha! I have a pretty fraught relationship with painting. I suppose rambling is productive if your listener is generous. Watch two minutes of a Kellyanne Conway speech and you see rambling masterfully employed toward the most sinister means...I made tbh pre Kellyanne. Susannah is a character that became the voice through whom an audio sculpture featured in my last solo exhibition, tbh, was written. She's a yoga instructor/pot head. She tells a rambling story about her body that gets projected from an enormous, velvet covered wooden platform.. Basically she gets a boob job that ends up being too big, and she realizes, over the course of a a hall-of mirrors-like few days of looking at people looking at her, that the agency that she has over her body is up for grabs. I think this show engages with questions of voyeurism and the female body in quieter ways. There is no narrating body. I suppose the rose is a stand-in for a body, but it also becomes an object for my body to wrestle with, endure, reject, etc.

AL- You've noted that your works and words are often large, or without a point of beginning or end, unless zoomed out and from afar. Do you think the same would happen--as in completion or development occur--if the viewer zoomed in or was right up close to the work?

AB- Oh yes- that’s my intention- to create something that is satisfying on a granular level as well as from afar. I want you to be in that deep. In fact, in tbh, I built the platform, Susannah, so large that you were forced to walk quite close to the prints. I print my images the same way you would print a fine art photograph- at incredibly high resolution for something that scale. This sets up a trompe l’oeil effect. The lettuce sort of pops off of the page. In the more abstract prints, closeness brings up questions that don’t exist from far away. I think the same can be true of some of my sound work. Even if you don’t listen for the full 20 minutes and understand the complete story, you get the sense of a character, of a world, by listening to a minute or two. It’s certainly true of the poem I just wrote (xxok). Each interaction is a like a molecule in this big formless puddle.

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AL- In our discussion on rambling, you said it was only productive if the viewer was attentive. Can attention be willed or forced within the viewer? Research-based practice quite nearly enacts this. Particularly in our state of high attention-deficit, or instantaneity, the requirement to go deeper into something--even if the work is not particularly desirous--is needed to complete the work. What would you want the viewer to research from your work? Or what research do you think your work would beg? 

AB- I heard at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s low-residency MFA program, your first class that you take is on attention. It’s all about how to harness and purposefully engage with a viewer’s routine habits of attention. That’s really exciting to me: a curriculum that champions that artists are attention engineers. But once you have a viewer’s attention, how are they going to navigate what you are presenting? I suppose that’s why we talk about research, because research implies some sort of method. And sometimes, and maybe this is true in my work, the artist presumes or slyly presents a sort of method of interpretation inherent in the work. So the artwork is at once the primary source and the method of interpretation all curled together. But I think the verb research in an art context is tricky. It’s hard for me to shake the idea that “research” necessitates conclusions. I want my art to be without conclusions, to leave gaps in understanding-- even in the text pieces when the language is the most purposefully clunky, mundane. “Conceptual” art or “research-based” practices can appeal to our Dionysian instincts. I really believe that. It’s not all Apollonian.

So anyway, what’s the method? I like thinking about the work that I present in groups, like the pieces in Beautiful, Beautiful, Beautiful Rose!, the way an analyst might think about a dream. Each element in the dream may be interesting in and of itself but it’s how they interact together, the linguistic and spatial relationships between the elements, that create the meaning. So your understanding of the poem on the floor will get richer as you listen to the sound piece, which will mirror or reiterate something formal about the video, all of which changes because it is on the carpet, and so on.

AL- What is your favorite rose/flower? (describe its genus and species and any other details)

AB- Favorite rose is a cabbage rose. They are fat and fluffy which is personally what I want from my roses. Also, if you google “cabbage rose” the first link to come up is “Cabbage Roses- A Cabbage Rose Must Read!” which reminds me of another favorite of mine: trashy spam articles. Although I feel like the person tending to a bed of cabbage roses is not reading spam. They are probably reading One Sip At A Time: Learning to Live in Provence.

 And Cockscomb! Cockscomb are the fuchsia carpet of the flower world- the floral equivalent of a Shar Pei puppy. The colors are vibrant and the texture is like velvety labia. What’s not to love? All of my understanding of flowers exists as “other details.” I grew up and live in cities so the majority of my contact with flowers is running my hand over them at bodegas.

AL- Can a painting/exhibition be a rose/flower? (not as in can it depict, but can it actually be) If yes/no - why?

Yes. Paintings can be roses because paintings can be anything. I have an expansive, promiscuous view of what painting can be so absolutely a rose can be a painting. In fact, most good art is as synesthetically sensual (and I don’t mean pretty) as a rose. I was ripping petals from roses the other day and I could not believe how indulgent and erotic it felt. I got the same feeling in front of Nicole Eisenman’s paintings. I don’t think indulgence is a bad thing. Good exhibitions should linger in or leave a stain on the viewer’s consciousness, but I don’t think exhibitions are roses. The rose needs no display.  An exhibition displays.

AL- I've been wanting to think about paintings and art (thus exhibitions and the formats of displays) as things that are not art qua art as we know it, but as an entirely new language of being and understanding. What is this exhibition then, if it could be anything what would you have it as?

 AB- That’s a great question. I sometimes play with semantics to help me think about the individual things I’m making- to find a logic to them. “These are pads of paper.” “This is a stage.” So, offering up an object as a heightened, estranged cousin of an everyday one. I suppose you could do that with exhibitions. “This is a Montessori classroom.” “This is a Noh Theater.” “This is a waiting room.” This exhibition might be a chill space for a party thrown by a wedding planner in NJ who just got her masters in contemporary art. (I kid. Kind of.) More sincerely, this exhibition was conceived of and created in collaboration with so many artists...in its adapting or rewriting of previous works and also in the collaborative nature of all of the pieces. So in that way, it really is this sort of love fest with other thinkers and makers. So maybe it’s some sort of a rose ceremony! Without the heteronormative bs.

_

Alan Longinois an art historian and writer, continuing his graduate studies in art history at Hunter College.

INTERVIEW // AMANDA SCHMITT IN CONVERSATION WITH JAMILE LACY

A CONVERSATION BETWEEN JAMILEE LACY AND AMANDA SCHMITT ON THE OCCASION OF THE SPLIT AT GRIN

Jamilee Lacy: Let’s begin with the word “primal”. Besides obvious definitions of original and primeval, primal often describes something as fundamental or of first importance. Though primal and its significations are not necessarily crucial to the overall curatorial premise for The Split, their context in The Primal Scream, Primal Therapy: The Cure for Neurosis and 1960s countercul- ture and beyond sets you on a course of research. In your search for and identification of artists to include, what became fundamental?

Amanda Schmitt: What became fundamental in my search and identification of artists to include in The Split was that the creation of each piece work fulfilled some sort of absolutely necessary action for the artist. a primal need:

What distinguishes psychosis from neurosis is the degree and complexity of symbolization. In neurosis, there is still an ample hold on reality. In psychosis that hold may be lost, and the person may be enveloped by symbolism, no longer being able to differentiate between symbols and reality.

—Arthur Janov in The Primal Scream, Primal Therapy: The Cure for Neurosis (1970), 352

For example, dozens of drawings by Sofi Brazzeal are displayed across the wall of the gallery. In her studio, through thousands of sketches on paper, the artist illustrates fantastical and surreal —as well as banal and inane—scenarios involving a range of characters in a myriad of landscapes. Brazzeal leaves the compositions loose, and seemingly unfinished—certainly never canonized on canvas. The artist continually draws, always moving to the next leaf of paper, at an anxious pace, both needing those figures and fending them off by representing them. Sofi needed these drawings to be realized, almost possessed by an urge to communicate almost as if through repetition an answer will reveal itself.

The exhibition also includes a 1963 audio recording of Musique Barbare, an album produced by Danish artist and COBRA co-founder Karel Appel. This is a cacophonous example of a visual artist (most well-known for his brutish abstract paintings) working with sound. Drums are banged, metal objects are clanged and cranked, bells are smashed, jars are tinkered, wires are slapped, all leading to a psychotic crescendo in which the artist screams in what seems almost like an exonerating release: "I don't paint, I hit!" [is] repeated over and over into oblivion. The artist is not articulating, he is screaming, and by doing so, reinforces that his actions arise from a primal force.

Lacy: And this notion of separation you mention in your curatorial statement:

My main interest in Janov's unique view is how early childhood trauma is experienced (both in minor and severe forms) and how, to cope —as a protective maneuver— the organism instinctively splits, thus suppressing unfelt feelings and creating unreal needs.

Can you point to work or two in the exhibition, or to relationships between works that manifest this idea?

Schmitt: A centerpiece of the exhibition is a video by Michel Auder, Talking Head (1981, converted to video in 2009), in which the voyeuristic camera peeks in on a private conversation that a young girl is having with herself. In her monologue, she reminisces about a 'thing', a thing that is loved but is never coming back again. The repetition of her longing for this 'thing' invokes a trauma; the young girl is unable to fulfill her desire to have this wonderful 'thing' and obsesses on the fact or fantasy about the thing’s possible or impossible pending return. This moment enacts "The Split", the moment where trauma is split from one's consciousness.

Lacy: Yes, Michel Auder’s entire oeuvre aptly demonstrates the inherent need of many artists to make life into work and work into life. I suppose this is why his work, which spans decades and subject matter, lends itself well to so many contexts.

Schmitt: Many artists create their work out of a need to accomplish or realize an idea. Through the lens of The Split, I wanted to look into whether these are real needs or perceived needs. In many instances, such as the case with Brazzeal or Appel, I believe these are real needs. Howev- er, some are straightforward and openly “perceived” needs (that is—unreal needs), that have been designed in order to explore a particular idea.

“Neurotic needs are unnatural ones—they develop from the non-satisfaction of real needs.” (Janov, 23)

For example, Jason Loebs' documentation of the results of rolling a twenty-sided die over and over again is an unnatural need. The toss of the di exists only for the artist’s desire to document the results. For the purposes of this exhibition, a hyper-repetitive and compulsive act such as roll- ing a dice thousands of times simply to document the results, represents a symbolic behavior in defense against excessive psycho-biological pain. In the process of creating this work, Loebs tossed and recorded the results of the dice nearly 500 times. This is self-perpetuating, because symbolic satisfactions cannot fulfill real needs. “In order for real needs to be satisfied, they must be felt and experienced” (Janov, 23). If those needs are not met, the pain is suppressed and tension endures, leaving the individual seeking to satisfy those needs in any way possible. Of course, a criteria for mental health does not translate into a criteria for art in a linear manner. It’s just that perceived or created needs are often the premise for great pieces.

From Left: HOLDING HIS FACE BETWEEN HER HANDS, SHE MAKES A SOUND by Davina Semo, beyond the decapitated 34-1 by Jason Loebs, beyond the decapitated by Jason Loebs, the room by Sarah Kurten, Fatebe Opens Doos by Ebecho Muslimova, Talking Head by Michel Auder, Chance Operation by Dawn Kasper

Lacy: Not so long ago, art history would have us believe that “psycho-biological pain” is behind all great works of art. It’s interesting to see it manifest here as something beyond the romanticized suffering artist. With Janov’s framework, Loebs’ work contextualizes emotional turmoil and/or mental suffering as an element of the human condition to be regularly addressed and, perhaps, harnessed and transcended...

Schmitt: “Anxiety is felt but not correctly focused fear. Anxiety is evoked with the defense system is weakened, allowing the feared feeling to near consciousness.” (Janov, 50)

Dawn Kasper's painting, Chance Operation (2014), is an abstract composition which seemingly was created by random scratches and scrawls across the surface of the panel, mixing white paint and black graphite. This work, as in many of Kasper’s work, evokes the feeling of anxiety, if not defining anxiety itself.

Then, we have an artist like Ebecho Muslimova, who enacts various outrageous scenarios through the guise of her alter-ego, Fat Ebe, who has let all traces of “proper femininity” go as she farts, burps, bleeds, and lets the curves of her body roll into every nook and cranny of her environment, endlessly acting out against normative ladylike behavior. These drawings are an effective symbolic way to act out a desire for catharsis, like the primal scream, without breaking into a full psychotic episode.

Conversely, art is not a means to project mental health diagnosis, or at least it is not my place as a curator to do so. I simply use this as a method to illustrate how artists, and specifically artists in this exhibition, are in a unique position to vocalize, or present inner desires and needs which we can easily recognize and identify with.

Lacy: Did origin story—whether that of the artist or the work—come into play?

Schmitt- I am looking at the origin story of the work that was created for this exhibition: was the work created by an impulse to control, or an impulse to amplify? Is the work trying to communicate some- thing much larger than what it can? And within those restrictions, does the work seem to be burst- ing at the seams, or has it already exploded?

Lacy: Do you spend a lot of time in artists’ studios? If so, what have you observed?

Schmitt: Yes, I am in a different artist’s studio on average a few times a week. On top of that, I live inside of an artist’s studio (my partner is an artist and keeps their studio in our living room). It is so difficult to summarize any observations as every studio is wildly different and there are no norms. Furthermore, a studio can be a physical place or a mental space.

Lacy: Do you think an artist's studio practice, such as the artist's setting(s) and routine(s), impacts the content of an artist's work? I wonder if, in the context of the exhibition premise, notions of origin and essentialism form in the studio or elsewhere.

Schmitt: I absolutely believe that the setting of an artist’s studio can impact the content of their work. I’ve often seen an artist’s immediate material and immaterial surroundings (such as neighborhood, access to materials, disposable income, neighboring artists’ studios, etc.) enter their work. Perhaps the greatest challenge for an artist is to escape cultural influences, which are all-encompassing and rigid realities to shatter.

On an optimistic note, I also believe that artists are able to transcend physicality, geography, and time, and thus can block any of these elements from affecting their work, if they so choose. Will to power at its best.

Lacy: In this Internet age of comprehensive websites and high-resolution images, are studio visits elementary to your work?

Schmitt: In answer to your question, in the age of the Internet, I believe that studio visits, and/or meeting the artist in person, is absolutely elementary to the work I do as a curator. That being said, I also believe it is possible to have a studio visit with an artist without actually stepping inside their physical studio space. I realize this refutes the essence of your question; however, I seek to expand these definitions.

Much of my curatorial practice has been shaped by restrictions in geography: when I first started curating exhibitions, I was working mostly with video, or non-visual work like sound, simply because these were mediums that artists were able to share with me despite not being able to schedule a studio visit. We could correspond via email, phone, and video chat. This has opened up limitless opportunities [for me] to work with artists from all over the world working in a variety of media. I don’t like to think of time or place as boundaries within my curatorial practice.

Finally, as a curator I believe it is essential to know the artist in order to know the artwork. On the contrary, however, I don’t believe it is necessary for the viewer to know the artist on a personal level. It is at this level that we say “art speaks for itself.” It is thus part of my role as curator to translate what I learn about the work meeting the artist in the exhibition format.

Lacy: Do you have a primary conceptual interest or an essential curatorial ethos?

Schmitt: As a curator, I don’t have ideas, I have opinions. Artists have the ideas; I examine them and recontextualize them in order to suggest different readings of the work.

Lacy: Is there something you linger on or consistently circle back to?

Schmitt: I am interested in art as artifact. I am interested in how that work will resonate in ten, twenty, 100, 500 years... It’s extremely difficult to step outside of one’s own perspective to posit future readings of an artwork, artist or exhibition. On top of that, it’s even more difficult to treat time-based or immaterial work as artifact.

Thanks to the internet and the digitization of art (and its archives), we are able to compress centuries’ worth of art into very short segments of time and compact spaces, such as a web page or catalog. I see my research as an exercise in constantly expanding and contracting: expanding my knowledge to think in thousand year spans while contracting time so that I am able to view hun- dreds of artworks in a single afternoon without leaving my desk, and then using this to develop the foresight for contextualization of the artists I work with.

Lacy: Let’s wrap up with that idea of separation again, of splitting, as you say. In many respects, your professional life is seemingly made up of many binaries, or in other words, a series of splits. Most notably in this sense: On the one hand, you move in artist circles and author creative content as a multi-hyphenate curator, programmer, writer, educator, and more. On the other hand, you play multiple roles as mediator and facilitator, moving in market circles and developing opportunities for gallerists and others, who in turn, provide various platforms for artists. Is there indeed such a division? In a time when there appears to be increasing fluidity between high and low culture, between lived and fabricated experience, such separations are somehow both necessary and superfluous, both intrinsic and superficial?

Schmitt: I don’t see any of my many roles in the art world as being contradictory, binary, or split. Rather, I believe each of my roles compliments the other, contributing to a more well-rounded or holistic career. The spaces and boundaries between those roles is increasingly porous. I’m comfort- able in my chameleon skin.

JAMILEE LACY

Jamilee Lacy is the director and curator of Providence College—Galleries in Rhode Island. Before relocating to Providence, Lacy worked in Chicago as a curator of education at Northwest- ern University and independently as an arts writer, curator, and founding director of Twelve Gal- leries Project (2008 - 2013). She has also worked as a writer and the managing editor for Bad at Sports, a leading international arts journal and podcast, and is currently producing (with Meg Onli) Remaking the Black Metropolis: Contemporary Art, Urbanity and Blackness in America, a forthcoming research survey and digital archive. Formerly, she was the inaugural curator-in-resi- dence for Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City, Missouri; a curatorial writer for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Illinois; and a curatorial associate for the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague, Czech Republic. Lacy has independently curated exhibitions and presented public programs around the world, and in addition to numerous catalogue essays, interviews and articles, she has published Color: Fully Engaged, a book of interviews and essays on contemporary art and color, and rises Zora: An Exploration of the Urban Labyrinth, which posits Kansas City and its artists as adventurous partners. She has engaged in solo and collabo- rative curatorial and writing projects with Academy Records, A+D Gallery at Columbia College Chicago, The Black Visual Archive, Chicago Artists’ Coalition & Hatch Projects, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Hyde Park Art Center, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, New Art Center in Boston, Quite Strong and the Sister Cities of Chicago (for Bratislava, Helsinki and Prague), among others. She has also written for Flash Art, Umelec Magazine, Art 21 Online and Art in America Online.

Lacy holds two undergraduate degrees in art history and studio art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Master of Comparative Art and Literature from Northwestern University.

jamileelacy.com