Kathy Aoki, The Brazilian (2009), Solar-plate etching

Creating a pseudo-museum experience, Aoki presents us with imagery that looks antique, but addresses current beauty and pop culture concepts. In this museum, which is based in 3011, there are two galleries that present archeological finds from the early 21st Century. Gallery One presents remnants from the reign of pop culture icon Gwen Stefani. Excavated from the Los Angeles area (now underwater), the archives include a personal Cartouche for the singer, Canopic jars representing her clothing line, her ex-fiance and band member Tony Kanal, and her music. Also on display is a flash drive that contains an antiquated sketch for Stefani’s Harujuku Lovers perfume line. The artist-created file actually exists on the flash drive, which is sold as a print-out with the piece (see image below).

Ink, watercolor, and graphite on paper, 26 x 40 inches framed

Joseph Smolinski is in curious awe of nature. Through developing societies, tragedies of war and natural disasters, trees continue to regulate our climate, improve our water quality and clean our air. The oldest and largest organisms on our planet have survived a history longer than we can seem to remember. Images of trees permeate his work not only through its religious, political and personal histories but also as means to question technology and the future of the natural world.

One day Smolinski came across a giant fake tree looming above the interstate landscape. This pseudo-biotech hybrid was erected to camouflage the cellular communication transmitters beneath its fronds. In this vision, parasitic cell tower trees populate the landscape in many forms that become historical landmarks, roadside curiosities and subjects of natural disasters.

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Styrofoam, electricians tape

Jared Clark is a painter who doesn’t paint. His work ingrains formal qualities of painting — color, line, composition, content — but his approach and use of sculptural media transgresses it. He acts in a playful and reverent manner to broaden the dialogue of painting and expand the scope of its location. As a self-described “interventionist,” Clark seeks to transform both the materials that he works with, and the dialogue of painting, through participation rather then reformation. In practice this leads Jared into the territory of ready-mades, installation, and playful systems that operate on multiple levels.

Mixed media on paper, pins

His “Paintings” often consist of found objects arranged in dialogue with the classic residence of painting: The wall, the grid, and the support. His palette of objects are carefully chosen, often found on site when it’s time to make the work, and left to remain three dimensional as they are transformed in object status to that of painting through his strategy of systematic arrangements. These arrangement systems often follow after those prescribed systems of modernist painting, though Jared ceaselessly finds playful and clever ways to disrupt these very same systems, resulting in elaborate and often baroque forms that do not question the status of painting so much as hint to it’s expansive ability to operate in conversation across media and dimensions.

Glass, bouncy balls

Text co-written by Svea Lin Vezzone and Jeff Eisenberg
More images | www.swarmgallery.com

We’d like to wecome Svea Lin Vezzone as Dailydujour’s newest guest blogger.  Svea is the director of the Swam Gallery in Oakland, CA.