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Art, Religion, and Success
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Theo Konrad Auer
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Last Updated on September, 23 2008 at 12:47 PM
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Oakland has many D.I.Y.-style galleries and underground warehouse
spaces, but it is significantly lacking when it comes to galleries that
can consistently sell, market and display contemporary art – and the
number of those that are showing innovative and fresh works is even
smaller. With the recent closure of Esteban Sabar Gallery, our city can
now only count three commercial spaces that regularly show contemporary
art.
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Oakland has many D.I.Y.-style galleries and underground warehouse spaces, but it is significantly lacking when it comes to galleries that can consistently sell, market and display contemporary art – and the number of those that are showing innovative and fresh works is even smaller. With the recent closure of Esteban Sabar Gallery, our city can now only count three commercial spaces that regularly show contemporary art.
One of them is Swarm Gallery and Studios that in the last two and half years has been steered by co-owner and director, Svea Lin Vezzone, to a place of respect. The space has created an innovative local business model combining a healthy balance between experimental art and commercial art with the sort of accessibility rarely seen in a commercial art gallery. Initially envisioned as a multidisciplinary art space that would house a gallery, studio spaces, a print shop and café – it would eventually take shape as a gallery with adjoining studio space. Taking a cue from a West Virginia art space, The Torpedo Factory, Swarm’s studios are open to the public during operating hours.
This last winter, Swarm along with Johansson Projects and the now defunct Esteban Sabar Gallery were the first galleries to ever be represented at the famed and high profile Miami art fair. Such art fairs are populated by hundreds of our nation’s most successful galleries, whether they are the commercial majority or the less easily definable minority of spaces that are innovating in a business that doesn’t always reward them.
Swarm has strongly hued to the latter, garnering flattering reviews from critics and art lovers alike. Within its airy 1, 600 square foot expanse of sun-drenched wall space, a home has been granted to works of emerging to mid-career artists. “A lot of the artists that I work haven’t been exhibiting for very long, they haven’t received major awards,” says Ms. Vezzone. “They’re are more likely to have had residencies or have been involved in their local art scene.”
This month, 31-year old artist Casey Jex Smith displays his paintings and mixed media works in a show at Swarm titled “Materials Unorganized.” Smith has shown his work at Swarm before. What makes this show different is that it’s his first as a represented artist with the gallery. Representation in the mainstream art world is a high and palpable sign of confidence placed upon an artist whom a dealer deems worthy as well as bankable.
Smith has created a body of work that somehow manages to be intensely autobiographical regarding his relationship with his faith. It achieves transcendence through the abstraction and thoughtful re-appropriation of the kitsch imagery employed in Sunday school books and other Christian and Mormon ephemera. His images convey heroism and faith through simple, almost naïve illustration. Faces from the Christian and Mormon historical record float in tense space. In one painting, a helmeted figure pays witness to the rocket-aided flight of a temple on its way to the Old Testament city of Enoch. He is, “…happy that his temple was built and it might be righteous enough that it would be taken up into heaven.”
I would put Smith’s work in good company with musicians like Sufjan Stevens who are furthering a more progressive and even existential Christianity. Smith however shies away from such associations, “I am not too much about my spirituality. I arrange things visually."
I note a dark undercurrent in his work. What I would call theological, Smith describes by saying, “Even though I try to make transcendent work, I still have pieces that are darker, cynical, critical. There’s an actual scripture…in second Nephi, ‘For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things.’ There’s no happiness without sadness.”
When I ask him about influences, he lists William Kentridge, Will Yackulic, Ricky Allman and Oakland based painter and zine-maker Chris Duncan with whom Casey shares such significant stylistic signatures as a tense balance between representation and abstraction, space and complex use of almost diagrammed or geometric line work. For Smith, this line work is often echoed in sacred architecture such as temples, “…After having drawn them for twenty years – sometimes in church - I started to see repeated themes, what they symbolize, what they represent…They’ve always been the center of any civilization, they’ve always been pointed upwards – to take your gaze upwards, to out into the stars, to figure out the mysteries of life.”
The future for Casey Jex Smith and Svea Lin Vezzone looks to be as brightly spectral as the spiritual phenomena that manifest themselves in much of Smith’s work. He’ll be showing new work at long time supporter John Trippe’s much buzzed about and cheekily named Fecal Face Dot Gallery in October as well in New York in the coming months. Svea Lin Vezzone is actively planning the next incarnation of Swarm, which is due to open next year. It will abandon the adjoining studios in favor of a space more than three times as large with a gallery for conceptual art as well as one for video work. It is an ambitious endeavor and could prove to be much like New York’s much lauded Deitch Projects, though given a decidedly Oakland spin as Vezzone’s art studio complex will still be nearby – and the D.I.Y. Spaces will still outnumber it.
I’ll give Ms. Vezzone the last word, in response to my question --Is the Oakland arts renaissance over-hyped? “A couple of years ago, it felt like things were on the brink of renaissance…it might have been because a lot of galleries were opening up,” says Ms. Vezzone. “I am still floating – the tide hasn’t come in yet… I wish there was more than one art district.”
Ongoing until October 5, 2008
Gallery hours: Tuesday - Sunday: Noon to 6 p.m. and by appointment |
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OAKLAND
EVENTS
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