dayoutlast is a record of my direct engagement with mostly contemporary art, mostly Los Angelean.

As this blog has evolved since its 2010 inception, so has my perspective. What I once perceived as central within the investigation was what was central, literally, within the photographic frame that I shared here. While still an important consideration, such thinking has also given way to more peripheral considerations, ones also accompanied occasionally by text (written manifestation of thought) and the oscillations between them. What's missing here are larger unknowns surrounding issues of presentation and representation; the amount of time and space it actually takes to accomplish such first-hand observations; and the quandaries between documentation and interpretation.

Despite my attempt to communicate here with image and text what is essential in some respect about the artwork, neither representation should ever be considered a substitution for the primary viewing experience. Of course, occasionally there are exceptions.

Most of the time, these posts are merely remnants---residual fragments---from my last day out.

Saturday, November 8, 2014

Sayre Gomez @ Francois Ghebaly


























A desire to connect with nature and convey a point of view, a window onto a world that reflects contemplation about the world around us, is all here and certainly a long tradition exists of such.  What might be taken for a slight gesture per De Maria's "Earth Room," for example, should be looked at more carefully by Gomez' use of reconstructed building materials to simulate a natural ground covering (not direct earth) and by illusionistic paintings and sculptures suggesting interior design all conflating the relationship between interior/exterior states of being.  Cf. the banners that, in my mind, seal the deal for this entire setting as a proposal for a public space inside a commercial, art gallery.  While Jay-Z, for example, plays softly, albeit cacaphonically, throughout the exhibition (note the colored speakers on the ground simulating rock (not rap)) and pithy aphorisms appropriated from songs of a gentler, bygone era adorn certain paintings with conflicting reversal, I am grounded in the present contemplating how the current condition looks about the same as the past, but on closer investigation, it is a puzzling subject regarding the passage of time in relation to what lies beneath the surface with no proposition.  While there is substance allusion, there is only blue-in-the-face illusion.

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